16 accepted papers
Teleoperated ultrasound can improve diagnostic medical imaging access for remote communities. Having accurate force feedback is important for enabling sonographers to apply the appropriate probe contact force to optimize ultrasound image quality. However, large time delays in communication make dire…
Recent work introduced human teleoperation (HT), where the remote robot typically used in conventional bilateral teleoperation is replaced by a novice person wearing a mixed reality headset and tracking the motion of a virtual tool controlled by an expert. HT has advantages in cost, complexity, and …
Most existing robotic surgery systems adopt a human-in-the-loop paradigm, often with the surgeon directly teleoperating the robotic system. Adding intelligence to these robots would enable higher-level control, such as supervised autonomy or even full autonomy. However, artificial intelligence (AI) …
Accurate and efficient surgical robotic tool pose estimation is of fundamental significance to downstream applications such as augmented reality (AR) in surgical training and learning-based autonomous manipulation. While significant advancements have been made in pose estimation for humans and anima
Tele-ultrasound has the potential greatly to improve health equity for countless remote communities. However, practical scenarios involve potentially large time delays which cause current implementations of telerobotic ultrasound (US) to fail. Using a local model of the remote environment to provide
This letter presents a novel approach to multi-axis force-sensing in laparoscopic surgery. It requires no modification to the surgical instrument and is therefore adaptable to different surgical tools. The sensing approach relies on a novel cannula design and utilizes a very high-resolution transduc
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
Tracking of tissue in the surgical environment is often done via locating frame-to-frame keypoint correspondences, and then using these correspondences to warp a prior underlying model such as a spline, mesh, or embedded deformation. We introduce a novel learned model which takes keypoint correspond…
Robots can perform multiple tasks in parallel. This work is about leveraging this capability in automating multilateral surgical subtasks. In particular, we explore, in a simulation study, the benefits of considering this parallelism capability in developing execution models for autonomous robotic s
We integrated a force/torque sensor into the wrist of the Master Tool Manipulator (MTM) of the da Vinci Standard Surgical system. The added sensor can be used to monitor the surgeon interaction forces and to improve the haptic experience. The proposed mechanical design is expected to have little eff
In this paper, we evaluate the effect of increasing camera baselines on depth perception in robot-assisted surgery. Restricted by the diameter of the surgical trocar through which they are inserted, current clinical stereo endoscopes have a fixed baseline of 5.5 mm. To overcome this restriction, we…
This paper evaluates the feasibility of a novel optical sensing concept to measure forces applied at the tip of daVinci EndoWrist instruments. An optical slit is clamped onto the instrument shaft, in-line with an infrared LED-bicell pair. Deflection of the shaft moves the slit with respect to the LE…
In this letter, we propose a training approach combining hand-over-hand and trial and error training approaches and we evaluate its effectiveness for both robotic and standard laparoscopic surgical training. The proposed approach makes use of the data of an expert collected while using the da Vinci
Photoacoustic imaging of the prostate is challenging due to the limited access and limited acoustic windows to the prostate gland. We aim to develop intraoperative prostate photoacoustic imaging using the da Vinci robotic system and a pick-up ultrasound transducer that can be easily picked up and ma
The current practice of intraoperative ultrasound requires an assistant because the surgeon's hands are occupied with surgical tools or console instruments. This process can be tedious and prone to error. Eye gaze is a promising control modality that can help address this issue. In previous work, a
This paper describes the implementation of a heart motion compensation system on the da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical Inc.) with the da Vinci Research Kit, for the purpose of simulating minimally invasive coronary artery bypass surgery on the beating heart. A Novint Falcon device is used