An Intelligent Robotic Endoscope Control System Based on Fusing Natural Language Processing and Vision Models

Abstract

In recent years, the area of Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS) is standing on the the verge of a new wave of innovations. However, autonomy in RAMIS is still in a primitive stage. Therefore, most surgeries still require manual control of the endoscope and the robotic instruments, resulting in surgeons needing to switch attention between performing surgical procedures and moving endoscope camera. Automation may reduce the complexity of surgical operations and consequently reduce the cognitive load on the surgeon while speeding up the surgical process. In this paper, a hybrid robotic endoscope control system based on fusion model of natural language processing (NLP) and modified YOLO-V8 vision model is proposed. This proposed system can analyze the current surgical workflow and generate logs to summarize the procedure for teaching and providing feedback to junior surgeons. The user study of this system indicated a significant reduction of the number of clutching actions and mean task time, which effectively enhanced the surgical training.