Autonomous tissue retraction with a biomechanically informed logic based framework
This work addresses the problem of reducing surgeons' cognitive load in safety-critical surgical environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts in surgical robotics.
The researchers tackled autonomous tissue retraction in robot-assisted surgery by developing a modular framework that integrates logic reasoning, biomechanical simulation, and situation awareness, achieving successful task completion with computational efficiency suitable for real surgical scenarios.
Autonomy in robot-assisted surgery is essential to reduce surgeons' cognitive load and eventually improve the overall surgical outcome. A key requirement for autonomy in a safety-critical scenario as surgery lies in the generation of interpretable plans that rely on expert knowledge. Moreover, the Autonomous Robotic Surgical System (ARSS) must be able to reason on the dynamic and unpredictable anatomical environment, and quickly adapt the surgical plan in case of unexpected situations. In this paper, we present a modular Framework for Robot-Assisted Surgery (FRAS) in deformable anatomical environments. Our framework integrates a logic module for task-level interpretable reasoning, a biomechanical simulation that complements data from real sensors, and a situation awareness module for context interpretation. The framework performance is evaluated on simulated soft tissue retraction, a common surgical task to remove the tissue hiding a region of interest. Results show that the framework has the adaptability required to successfully accomplish the task, handling dynamic environmental conditions and possible failures, while guaranteeing the computational efficiency required in a real surgical scenario. The framework is made publicly available.