Robotic Intracorporeal Palpation With a Miniature Force-Sensing Probe for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Abstract

Intraoperative tissue palpation is crucial in surgical procedures to ensure operational safety and clinical outcomes. However, current robotic minimally invasive surgery (MIS) fundamentally decouples surgeons’ haptic perception from tissue interaction, posing substantial challenges for intracorporeal stiffness assessment. To address this limitation, we present an intracorporeal robotic palpation framework integrating our team’s recently developed vision-based multi-axis force sensing module. This miniature sensing module (φ5mm) enables real-time tissue interaction force measurement during endoscopic operations. The proposed system employs teleoperated robotic control with remote center of motion (RCM) constraints to ensure safe instrument manipulation. It continuously correlates tissue deformation data with contact forces to reconstruct spatial stiffness distributions. Through iterative palpation maneuvers, the system dynamically updates the stiffness map of target anatomical regions. Comprehensive validation experiments were conducted using ex-vivo chicken tissues under simulated MIS conditions, demonstrating: 1) The system’s capability to reconstruct heterogeneous tissue stiffness distributions by resolving contact forces and tissue deformation estimation; 2) Effective implementation of the proposed framework to MIS considering RCM constraint. These results substantiate the clinical viability of the miniature force-sensing module for robotic intracorporeal palpation and establish a paradigm for enhancing haptic feedback in MIS applications.