38 accepted papers
Subretinal injection is a highly delicate procedure that demands micron-level precision to avoid irreversible retinal damage. Current robotic systems achieve accurate positioning but remain limited by retinal motion and the lack of tip-force feedback. We present the first adaptive tip-force compensa…
Robotic platforms provide consistent and precise tool positioning that significantly enhances retinal microsurgery. Integrating such systems with intraoperative optical coherence tomography (iOCT) enables image-guided robotic interventions, allowing autonomous performance of advanced treatments, suc
The Galen Surgical Robot is an admittance controlled collaborative robot that can enhance the performance of surgeons in microsurgery by sharing the load of instruments, preventing hand tremor and improving precision. In mastoidectomy, contacting the temporal bone of the skull and drilling with the
A surgeon’s physiological hand tremor can significantly impact the outcome of delicate and precise retinal surgery, such as retinal vein cannulation (RVC) and epiretinal membrane peeling. Robot-assisted eye surgery technology provides ophthalmologists with advanced capabilities such as hand tremor c…
Skull base surgery is a demanding field in which surgeons operate in and around the skull while avoiding critical anatomical structures including nerves and vasculature. While image-guided surgical navigation is the prevailing standard, limitation still exists requiring personalized planning and rec…
The rigid and straight nature of conventional surgical drills and screwdrivers makes it difficult to access the posterior mandible for fracture reduction without the creation of facial incisions. To assist transoral mandibular fracture reduction in hard-to-reach areas, we propose a shared-control de…
An <i>in situ</i> needle manipulation technique used by physicians when performing spinal injections is modeled to study its effect on needle shape and needle tip position. A mechanics-based model is proposed and solved using finite element method. A test setup is presented to mimic the needle manip
The introduction of image-guided surgical navigation (IGSN) has greatly benefited technically demanding surgical procedures by providing real-time support and guidance to the surgeon during surgery. To develop effective IGSN, a careful selection of the surgical information and the medium to present…
Neural surface reconstruction has been shown to be powerful for recovering dense 3D surfaces via image-based neural rendering. However, current methods struggle to recover detailed structures of real-world scenes. To address the issue, we present Neuralangelo, which combines the representation power…
This paper introduces the first integrated real-time intraoperative surgical guidance system, in which an endoscope camera of da Vinci surgical robot and a transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) transducer are co-registered using photoacoustic markers that are detected in both fluorescence (FL) and photoacou
Telesurgery has a clear potential for providing high-quality surgery to medically underserved areas like rural areas, battlefields, and spacecraft; nevertheless, effective methods to overcome unreliable communication systems are still lacking. Furthermore, it is not well understood how users react a…
"Stereo depth estimation is of great interest for computer vision research. However, existing methods struggles to generalize and predict reliably in hazardous regions, such as large uniform regions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Context Enhanced Path (CEP). CEP improves the generalizati…
Automation has the potential to improve the standard of care but is difficult to realize due to perceptual challenges, especially in soft-tissue surgery. Machine learning can provide solutions, but typically requires large amounts of training data, which is time-consuming to collect. Even with share
In endoscopy, many applications (e.g., surgical navigation) would benefit from a real-time method that can simultaneously track the endoscope and reconstruct the dense 3D geometry of the observed anatomy from a monocular endoscopic video. To this end, we develop a Simultaneous Localization and Mappi…
Traditional teleoperation (leader/follower) systems primarily focus on one operator controlling one remote robot, but as robots become ubiquitous, there is an increasing need for multiple operators, including autonomous agents, to collaboratively control multiple robots. However, existing teleoperat
This paper presents the development and experimental evaluation of an active steering hand-held robotic system for milling and curved drilling in minimally invasive orthopaedic interventions. The system comprises a cable-driven continuum dexterous manipulator (CDM), an actuation unit with a handpiec
Malaria is a worldwide scourge, and the broad deployment of an effective vaccine would improve the lives of millions of people. A vaccine based on Plasmodium falciparum (PfSPZ) sporozoites extracted from the salivary glands of infected mosquitoes shows significant promise. However, the large-scale i…
Extracting geometric features from 3D models is a common first step in applications such as 3D registration, tracking, and scene flow estimation. Many hand-crafted and learning-based methods aim to produce consistent and distinguishable geometric features for 3D models with partial overlap. These me…
The assumption of fixed contact between robots and deformable objects (DOs) is widely used by previous DO manipulation (DOM) studies. However, the fixed contact setting is inapplicable to many real-life applications due to various factors, such as the end-effector's type and the DO's intrinsic mater
Stereo depth estimation relies on optimal correspondence matching between pixels on epipolar lines in the left and right images to infer depth. In this work, we revisit the problem from a sequence-to-sequence correspondence perspective to replace cost volume construction with dense pixel matching us…
Lumbar injection is an image-guided procedure performed manually for diagnosis and treatment of lower back pain and leg pain. Previously, we have developed and verified an MR-Conditional robotic solution to assisting the needle insertion process. Drawing on our clinical experiences, a virtual remote…
Robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery can filter surgeons' hand tremors and provide safe, accurate tool manipulation. In this paper, we report the design, optimization, and evaluation of a novel tilt mechanism for a new Steady-Hand Eye Robot (SHER). The new tilt mechanism features a four-bar linkage…
This paper presents a dynamic constraint formulation to provide protective virtual fixtures of 3D anatomical structures from polygon mesh representations. The proposed approach can anisotropically limit the tool motion of surgical robots without any assumption of the local anatomical shape close to…
High-quality 3D reconstructions from endoscopy video play an important role in many clinical applications, including surgical navigation where they enable direct video-CT registration. While many methods exist for general multi-view 3D reconstruction, these methods often fail to deliver satisfactory…
In this paper, a novel semi-autonomous control framework is presented for enabling probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) scan of the retinal tissue. With pCLE, retinal layers such as nerve fiber layer (NFL) and retinal ganglion cell (RGC) can be scanned and characterized in real-time for…
In adult laparoscopy, robot-aided surgery is a reality in thousands of operating rooms worldwide, owing to the increased dexterity provided by the robotic tools. Many robots and robot control techniques have been developed to aid in more challenging scenarios, such as pediatric surgery and microsurg…
When robotic assistance is present into vitreoretinal surgery, the surgeon will experience reduced sensory input that is otherwise derived from the tool's interaction with the eye wall (sclera). We speculate that disconnecting the surgeon from this sensory input may increase the risk of injury to th…
Tracking and controlling the shape of continuum dexterous manipulators (CDM) in constraint environments is a challenging task. The imposed constraints and interaction with unknown obstacles may conform the CDM's shape and therefore demands for shape sensing methods which do not rely on direct line o…
During open surgeries, surgeons use tactile palpation to form an understanding of the anatomy, including any underlying anatomical structures such as arteries or tumors. This letter explores methods for restoring this capability in the context of minimally invasive robot-assisted surgery. Previous w
This letter reports the development of a vision-based calibration method for dual remote center-of-motion (RCM) based robot arms in a human-robot collaborative minimally invasive surgery (MIS) scenario. The method does not require any external tracking sensors and directly uses images captured by th
In conventional core decompression of osteonecrosis, surgeons cannot successfully reach the whole area of the femoral head due to rigidity of the instruments currently used. To address this issue, we present design and fabrication of a novel steerable drill using a continuum dexterous manipulator (C
This paper presents the development and evaluation of concurrent control of a robotic system for less-invasive treatment of osteolytic lesions behind an acetabular implant. This system implements safety constraints including a remote center of motion (RCM), virtual walls, and joint limits while oper
In this letter, we propose a new method to fully control complete 4-image-DoF manipulation of laparoscopic instruments [with remote center of motion (RCM) mechanism] based on the geometric features of a designed marker in a 2-D image. Our marker encodes the configuration of the instruments by comput
Surgeons often manually palpate tissue or organs in order to find tumors or other anatomical structures. Information about organ geometry and tissue stiffness gained from palpation can also be extremely useful in robotic surgery for diagnosis, surgical guidance, and registration to other preoperativ
Lesions of the lateral skull base in the petrous apex present unique surgical challenges because of the proximity of critical structures, including the inner ear, carotid artery, jugular bulb, facial nerve, lower cranial nerves, dura and brain. Currently, there are few appropriate surgical devices t
Suturing is a challenging and highly dexterous task in minimally invasive surgery, even with the assistance of robotic surgical systems. In this work, we propose a simple yet versatile impedance virtual fixture framework, which can be applied on the master manipulator in a tele-operated robotic surg…
In retinal microsurgery, membrane peeling is a standard procedure requiring the delamination of a thin fibrous membrane adherent to the retina surface by applying very small forces. Robotic devices with combined force-sensing instruments have significant potential to assist this procedure by facilit…
Shape sensing techniques utilizing Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) arrays can enable real-time tracking and control of dexterous continuum manipulators (DCM) used in minimally invasive surgeries. For many surgical applications, the DCM may need to operate with much larger curvatures than what current shap…