Research on Intraoperative Cornea-Instrument-Robot Interaction for Autonomous Cornea Suturing

摘要

During corneal transplantation, 16~24 submillimeter-sized sutures are generated around the circular graft cornea. Two major challenges of surgeons, fatigue after long-time operation and physiological trembling around 180 μm, could be reduced by automating surgical subtasks. 3-D kinematic trajectory planning of the instruments, including needle, thread, forceps and holder, and the estimation of force and torque of the cornea-instrument-robot interaction are the crucial steps towards autonomous operations. In this paper, based on the automated corneal suturing surgical robot, an approach for the cornea-instrument-robot interaction to be quantified is proposed to accurately assist or replace surgeons to complete sutures including needle insertion and knot tying. Intraoperative cornea-instrument-robot interaction based on the clinical operation guidelines is firstly analyzed, and then actuating torque of each joint to finish these clinical guidelines is calculated using the inverse dynamics. At last, the simulation result shows that the proposed model is able to generate suturing actions as designed before. This is the first study to quantitatively analyze the cornea-instrument-robot interaction and to demonstrate the feasibility to autonomously perform corneal suturing.