No Arabic abstract
Miniaturized instruments are highly needed for robot assisted medical healthcare and treatment, especially for less invasive surgery as it empowers more flexible access to restricted anatomic intervention. But the robotic design is more challenging due to the contradictory needs of miniaturization and the capability of manipulating with a large dexterous workspace. Thus, kinematic parameter optimization is of great significance in this case. To this end, this paper proposes an approach based on dexterous workspace determination for designing a miniaturized tendon-driven surgical instrument under necessary restraints. The workspace determination is achieved by boundary determination and volume estimation with partition and least-squares polynomial fitting methods. The final robotic configuration with optimized kinematic parameters is proved to be eligible with a large enough dexterous workspace and targeted miniature size.
Master control console is a place where robots collaborate with humans in a shared environment. To this end, ergonomics is an important aspect to be considered. With ergonomic design, the surgeons can feel more comfortable to conduct the surgical tasks with higher efficiency, and the quality of the teleoperated robotic surgery can be improved. In this paper, an Ergonomic Interaction Workspace Analysis method is proposed to optimize master manipulators and fulfil ergonomics consideration for designing a master manipulator for teleoperated robotic surgery.
Datasets are an essential component for training effective machine learning models. In particular, surgical robotic datasets have been key to many advances in semi-autonomous surgeries, skill assessment, and training. Simulated surgical environments can enhance the data collection process by making it faster, simpler and cheaper than real systems. In addition, combining data from multiple robotic domains can provide rich and diverse training data for transfer learning algorithms. In this paper, we present the DESK (Dexterous Surgical Skill) dataset. It comprises a set of surgical robotic skills collected during a surgical training task using three robotic platforms: the Taurus II robot, Taurus II simulated robot, and the YuMi robot. This dataset was used to test the idea of transferring knowledge across different domains (e.g. from Taurus to YuMi robot) for a surgical gesture classification task with seven gestures. We explored three different scenarios: 1) No transfer, 2) Transfer from simulated Taurus to real Taurus and 3) Transfer from Simulated Taurus to the YuMi robot. We conducted extensive experiments with three supervised learning models and provided baselines in each of these scenarios. Results show that using simulation data during training enhances the performance on the real robot where limited real data is available. In particular, we obtained an accuracy of 55% on the real Taurus data using a model that is trained only on the simulator data. Furthermore, we achieved an accuracy improvement of 34% when 3% of the real data is added into the training process.
Short response time is critical for future military medical operations in austere settings or remote areas. Such effective patient care at the point of injury can greatly benefit from the integration of semi-autonomous robotic systems. To achieve autonomy, robots would require massive libraries of maneuvers. While this is possible in controlled settings, obtaining surgical data in austere settings can be difficult. Hence, in this paper, we present the Dexterous Surgical Skill (DESK) database for knowledge transfer between robots. The peg transfer task was selected as it is one of 6 main tasks of laparoscopic training. Also, we provide a ML framework to evaluate novel transfer learning methodologies on this database. The collected DESK dataset comprises a set of surgical robotic skills using the four robotic platforms: Taurus II, simulated Taurus II, YuMi, and the da Vinci Research Kit. Then, we explored two different learning scenarios: no-transfer and domain-transfer. In the no-transfer scenario, the training and testing data were obtained from the same domain; whereas in the domain-transfer scenario, the training data is a blend of simulated and real robot data that is tested on a real robot. Using simulation data enhances the performance of the real robot where limited or no real data is available. The transfer model showed an accuracy of 81% for the YuMi robot when the ratio of real-to-simulated data was 22%-78%. For Taurus II and da Vinci robots, the model showed an accuracy of 97.5% and 93% respectively, training only with simulation data. Results indicate that simulation can be used to augment training data to enhance the performance of models in real scenarios. This shows the potential for future use of surgical data from the operating room in deployable surgical robots in remote areas.
3-D pose estimation of instruments is a crucial step towards automatic scene understanding in robotic minimally invasive surgery. Although robotic systems can potentially directly provide joint values, this information is not commonly exploited inside the operating room, due to its possible unreliability, limited access and the time-consuming calibration required, especially for continuum robots. For this reason, standard approaches for 3-D pose estimation involve the use of external tracking systems. Recently, image-based methods have emerged as promising, non-invasive alternatives. While many image-based approaches in the literature have shown accurate results, they generally require either a complex iterative optimization for each processed image, making them unsuitable for real-time applications, or a large number of manually-annotated images for efficient learning. In this paper we propose a self-supervised image-based method, exploiting, at training time only, the imprecise kinematic information provided by the robot. In order to avoid introducing time-consuming manual annotations, the problem is formulated as an auto-encoder, smartly bottlenecked by the presence of a physical model of the robotic instruments and surgical camera, forcing a separation between image background and kinematic content. Validation of the method was performed on semi-synthetic, phantom and in-vivo datasets, obtained using a flexible robotized endoscope, showing promising results for real-time image-based 3-D pose estimation of surgical instruments.
X-ray image based surgical tool navigation is fast and supplies accurate images of deep seated structures. Typically, recovering the 6 DOF rigid pose and deformation of tools with respect to the X-ray camera can be accurately achieved through intensity-based 2D/3D registration of 3D images or models to 2D X-rays. However, the capture range of image-based 2D/3D registration is inconveniently small suggesting that automatic and robust initialization strategies are of critical importance. This manuscript describes a first step towards leveraging semantic information of the imaged object to initialize 2D/3D registration within the capture range of image-based registration by performing concurrent segmentation and localization of dexterous surgical tools in X-ray images. We presented a learning-based strategy to simultaneously localize and segment dexterous surgical tools in X-ray images and demonstrate promising performance on synthetic and ex vivo data. We currently investigate methods to use semantic information extracted by the proposed network to reliably and robustly initialize image-based 2D/3D registration. While image-based 2D/3D registration has been an obvious focus of the CAI community, robust initialization thereof (albeit critical) has largely been neglected. This manuscript discusses learning-based retrieval of semantic information on imaged-objects as a stepping stone for such initialization and may therefore be of interest to the IPCAI community. Since results are still preliminary and only focus on localization, we target the Long Abstract category.