Virtual Fixture Assistance for Suturing in Robot-Aided Pediatric Endoscopic Surgery
This work addresses safety and precision challenges for surgeons performing suturing in pediatric endoscopic surgery, representing an incremental improvement in robot-assisted surgical assistance.
The paper tackled the difficulty of surgical suturing in constrained pediatric endoscopic workspaces by proposing guidance virtual fixtures using constrained optimization and force feedback, resulting in more precise and safer looping in robot-assisted procedures.
The limited workspace in pediatric endoscopic surgery makes surgical suturing one of the most difficult tasks. During suturing, surgeons have to prevent collisions between tools and also collisions with the surrounding tissues. Surgical robots have been shown to be effective in adult laparoscopy, but assistance for suturing in constrained workspaces has not been yet fully explored. In this letter, we propose guidance virtual fixtures to enhance the performance and the safety of suturing while generating the required task constraints using constrained optimization and Cartesian force feedback. We propose two guidance methods: looping virtual fixtures and a trajectory guidance cylinder, that are based on dynamic geometric elements. In simulations and experiments with a physical robot, we show that the proposed methods achieve a more precise and safer looping in robot-assisted pediatric endoscopy.