MiDAS: A Multimodal Data Acquisition System and Dataset for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery
This addresses a barrier for RMIS researchers by providing a non-invasive alternative to proprietary data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing sensing technologies.
The authors tackled the problem of limited access to proprietary robot telemetry in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) research by introducing MiDAS, an open-source, platform-agnostic system for multimodal data acquisition, which enabled gesture recognition performance comparable to proprietary telemetry.
Background: Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) research increasingly relies on multimodal data, yet access to proprietary robot telemetry remains a major barrier. We introduce MiDAS, an open-source, platform-agnostic system enabling time-synchronized, non-invasive multimodal data acquisition across surgical robotic platforms. Methods: MiDAS integrates electromagnetic and RGB-D hand tracking, foot pedal sensing, and surgical video capturing without requiring proprietary robot interfaces. We validated MiDAS on the open-source Raven-II and the clinical da Vinci Xi by collecting multimodal datasets of peg transfer and hernia repair suturing tasks performed by surgical residents. Correlation analysis and downstream gesture recognition experiments were conducted. Results: External hand and foot sensing closely approximated internal robot kinematics and non-invasive motion signals achieved gesture recognition performance comparable to proprietary telemetry. Conclusion: MiDAS enables reproducible multimodal RMIS data collection and is released with annotated datasets, including the first multimodal dataset capturing hernia repair suturing on high-fidelity simulation models.