Toward Autonomous Robotic Micro-Suturing using Optical Coherence Tomography Calibration and Path Planning
This addresses the challenge of precise suturing in microsurgery for surgeons, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotic and imaging methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automating robotic micro-suturing by developing a system that uses 3D optical coherence tomography for imaging feedback, achieving an overall accuracy of 0.27 mm in planned needle entry and exit points on tissue phantoms and animal tissue.
Robotic automation has the potential to assist human surgeons in performing suturing tasks in microsurgery, and in order to do so a robot must be able to guide a needle with sub-millimeter precision through soft tissue. This paper presents a robotic suturing system that uses 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) system for imaging feedback. Calibration of the robot-OCT and robot-needle transforms, wound detection, keypoint identification, and path planning are all performed automatically. The calibration method handles pose uncertainty when the needle is grasped using a variant of iterative closest points. The path planner uses the identified wound shape to calculate needle entry and exit points to yield an evenly-matched wound shape after closure. Experiments on tissue phantoms and animal tissue demonstrate that the system can pass a suture needle through wounds with 0.27 mm overall accuracy in achieving the planned entry and exit points.