International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (Apr 2015)

Development of a Cognitive Robotic System for Simple Surgical Tasks

  • Riccardo Muradore,
  • Paolo Fiorini,
  • Gokhan Akgun,
  • Duygun Erol Barkana,
  • Marcello Bonfe,
  • Fabrizio Boriero,
  • Andrea Caprara,
  • Giacomo De Rossi,
  • Riccardo Dodi,
  • Ole Jakob Elle,
  • Federica Ferraguti,
  • Lorenza Gasperotti,
  • Roger Gassert,
  • Kim Mathiassen,
  • Dilla Handini,
  • Olivier Lambercy,
  • Lin Li,
  • Maarja Kruusmaa,
  • Auralius Oberman Manurung,
  • Giovanni Meruzzi,
  • Ho Quoc Phuong Nguyen,
  • Nicola Preda,
  • Gianluca Riolfo,
  • Asko Ristolainen,
  • Alberto Sanna,
  • Cristian Secchi,
  • Marco Torsello,
  • Asim Evren Yantac

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5772/60137
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12

Abstract

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The introduction of robotic surgery within the operating rooms has significantly improved the quality of many surgical procedures. Recently, the research on medical robotic systems focused on increasing the level of autonomy in order to give them the possibility to carry out simple surgical actions autonomously. This paper reports on the development of technologies for introducing automation within the surgical workflow. The results have been obtained during the ongoing FP7 European funded project Intelligent Surgical Robotics (I-SUR). The main goal of the project is to demonstrate that autonomous robotic surgical systems can carry out simple surgical tasks effectively and without major intervention by surgeons. To fulfil this goal, we have developed innovative solutions (both in terms of technologies and algorithms) for the following aspects: fabrication of soft organ models starting from CT images, surgical planning and execution of movement of robot arms in contact with a deformable environment, designing a surgical interface minimizing the cognitive load of the surgeon supervising the actions, intra-operative sensing and reasoning to detect normal transitions and unexpected events. All these technologies have been integrated using a component-based software architecture to control a novel robot designed to perform the surgical actions under study. In this work we provide an overview of our system and report on preliminary results of the automatic execution of needle insertion for the cryoablation of kidney tumours.