Deformation invariant bounding spheres for dynamic active constraints in surgery

Reconstruct Dynamic Soft-Tissue With Stereo Endoscope Based on a Single-Layer Network

In dynamic minimally invasive surgery environments, 3D reconstruction of deformable soft-tissue surfaces with stereo endoscopic images is very challenging. A simple self-supervised stereo reconstruction framework is proposed to address this issue, which bridges the traditional geometric deformable models and the newly revived neural networks. The equivalence between the classical thin plate spline (TPS) model and a single-layer fully-connected or convolutional network is studied. By alternating training of two TPS equivalent networks within the self-supervised framework, disparity priors are learnt from the past stereo frames of target tissues to form an optimized disparity basis, on which disparity maps of subsequent frames can be estimated more accurately without sacrificing computational efficiency and robustness. The proposed method was verified on stereo-endoscopic videos recorded by the da Vinci^® surgical robots.

Prevalence of haptic feedback in robot-mediated surgery: a systematic review of literature

With the successful uptake and inclusion of robotic systems in minimally invasive surgery and with the increasing application of robotic surgery (RS) in numerous surgical specialities worldwide, there is now a need to develop and enhance the technology further. One such improvement is the implementation and amalgamation of haptic feedback technology into RS which will permit the operating surgeon on the console to receive haptic information on the type of tissue being operated on. The main advantage of using this is to allow the operating surgeon to feel and control the amount of force applied to different tissues during surgery thus minimising the risk of tissue damage due to both the direct and indirect effects of excessive tissue force or tension being applied during RS. We performed a two-rater systematic review to identify the latest developments and potential avenues of improving technology in the application and implementation of haptic feedback technology to the operating surgeon on the console during RS. This review provides a summary of technological enhancements in RS, considering different stages of work, from proof of concept to cadaver tissue testing, surgery in animals, and finally real implementation in surgical practice. We identify that at the time of this review, while there is a unanimous agreement regarding need for haptic and tactile feedback, there are no solutions or products available that address this need. There is a scope and need for new developments in haptic augmentation for robot-mediated surgery with the aim of improving patient care and robotic surgical technology further.

Robotic Surgery – A Personal View of the Past, Present and Future

Research into robotic surgery has been undertaken for over 25 years. In that period a small number of companies have been formed to exploit this research and have undertaken clinical trials on patients. However, far fewer clinical applications have been undertaken than would have been expected from the level of research activity. This paper puts forward a number of reasons for this, many of which are not to do with the technology but are a consequence of the clinical and business environments. Recommendations are provided that will hopefully increase the number of clinical systems being applied. Some predictions are made for the future which should increase the number of commercial systems and thus achieve patient benefits.