The Must-Have in Robotic Heart Surgery: Haptic Feedback

Abstract

Robots have a number of advantages over humans in performing routine manipulation tasks. Their accuracy and repeatability allow robots to succeed in the medical and surgical market. Some of the weaknesses in current robotic devices, such as substantial lack of haptic feedback and adaptability are to be highlighted. Currently it is not possible to “program” a robot to perform steps of a surgical operation autonomously. Nevertheless, some of these limitations do not prevent robots from being useful in the operating room; rather considerable human, technical and surgical input, guidance and advancement are needed. Surgical robots can be viewed as “extending and enhancing human capabilities” rather than replacing surgeons, in contrast to the example of industrial replacement of humans by robots. Intuitive Surgical® intended to create with the Da Vinci® Surgical System a conception of a surgeon-robot interface so transparent to the surgeon that his set of skills can be used in a natural and instinctive manner. Its accurate visualisation is critical since visual cues are used to compensate for the loss of haptic feedback. The haptic feedback is currently limited to interact with rigid structures, such as tool-on-tool collisions, not soft tissues. This requires the surgeon to rely on visual feedback in tasks such as suturing. Especially for fine suture material approaches began in research groups to analyse haptic feedback (Okamura, 2004; Kitagawa et al., 2005), but the way of the evaluating setup is not fulfilling the special medical interest for heart surgeons. The basic consideration in our work is to offer the heart surgeon an accessory sensory channel in addition to the visual channel not only to avoid breakage of surgical suture material and tissue, but also to decrease visual fatigue.