Using Intermittent Synchronization to Compensate for Rhythmic Body Motion During Autonomous Surgical Cutting and Debridement
This addresses the challenge of improving precision and reliability in robotic surgery for medical applications, representing an incremental advance in motion compensation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of performing autonomous surgical cutting and debridement in the presence of rhythmic body motion by proposing an intermittent synchronization method that aligns with low-velocity windows. The results show a 2.6x reduction in max cutting error and an increase in debridement success rate from 62% to 80%.
Anatomical structures are rarely static during a surgical procedure due to breathing, heartbeats, and peristaltic movements. Inspired by observing an expert surgeon, we propose an intermittent synchronization with the extrema of the rhythmic motion (i.e., the lowest velocity windows). We performed 2 experiments: (1) pattern cutting, and (2) debridement. In (1), we found that the intermittent synchronization approach, while 1.8x slower than tracking motion, was significantly more robust to noise and control latency, and it reduced the max cutting error by 2.6x In (2), a baseline approach with no synchronization achieves 62% success rate for each removal, while intermittent synchronization achieves 80%.