Autonomous Vision-Guided Resection of Central Airway Obstruction
This work addresses the need for precise, minimally-invasive palliative resection of tracheal tumors, representing an incremental advancement in robotic surgery.
The paper tackled the problem of imprecise tracheal tumor resection by developing an autonomous vision-guided system that successfully cleared airway obstructions in ex-vivo animal tissue models, achieving over 90% volumetric tumor removal without trachea perforation in all five experiments.
Existing tracheal tumor resection methods often lack the precision required for effective airway clearance, and robotic advancements offer new potential for autonomous resection. We present a vision-guided, autonomous approach for palliative resection of tracheal tumors. This system models the tracheal surface with a fifth-degree polynomial to plan tool trajectories, while a custom Faster R-CNN segmentation pipeline identifies the trachea and tumor boundaries. The electrocautery tool angle is optimized using handheld surgical demonstrations, and trajectories are planned to maintain a 1 mm safety clearance from the tracheal surface. We validated the workflow successfully in five consecutive experiments on ex-vivo animal tissue models, successfully clearing the airway obstruction without trachea perforation in all cases (with more than 90% volumetric tumor removal). These results support the feasibility of an autonomous resection platform, paving the way for future developments in minimally-invasive autonomous resection.