Design of a teleoperation scheme with a wearable master for minimally invasive surgery

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery is increasingly being preferred over conventional surgery, however many problems still persist in longer surgeries such as pituitary surgeries, where surgeons are still required to hold an endoscope in their hand for prolonged periods of time. Many modern approaches have recently been proposed in literature to reduce the surgeon’s effort. In this paper we extended upon these previous attempts and presented a promising solution; a real time teleoperation scheme with 3 different modes of operation, composed of a wearable ring system that captures and transmits voluntary hand motions over a wireless connection to a slave system. Accordingly, this slave system processes the received data to generate velocity demands for the robot endoscope controller. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed modes of operation are demonstrated and compared by measuring their learning curve and effort by running a set of training simulations on human subjects.