1,325 research outputs found
Medical image computing and computer-aided medical interventions applied to soft tissues. Work in progress in urology
Until recently, Computer-Aided Medical Interventions (CAMI) and Medical
Robotics have focused on rigid and non deformable anatomical structures.
Nowadays, special attention is paid to soft tissues, raising complex issues due
to their mobility and deformation. Mini-invasive digestive surgery was probably
one of the first fields where soft tissues were handled through the development
of simulators, tracking of anatomical structures and specific assistance
robots. However, other clinical domains, for instance urology, are concerned.
Indeed, laparoscopic surgery, new tumour destruction techniques (e.g. HIFU,
radiofrequency, or cryoablation), increasingly early detection of cancer, and
use of interventional and diagnostic imaging modalities, recently opened new
challenges to the urologist and scientists involved in CAMI. This resulted in
the last five years in a very significant increase of research and developments
of computer-aided urology systems. In this paper, we propose a description of
the main problems related to computer-aided diagnostic and therapy of soft
tissues and give a survey of the different types of assistance offered to the
urologist: robotization, image fusion, surgical navigation. Both research
projects and operational industrial systems are discussed
Autonomous Tissue Scanning under Free-Form Motion for Intraoperative Tissue Characterisation
In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), tissue scanning with imaging probes is
required for subsurface visualisation to characterise the state of the tissue.
However, scanning of large tissue surfaces in the presence of deformation is a
challenging task for the surgeon. Recently, robot-assisted local tissue
scanning has been investigated for motion stabilisation of imaging probes to
facilitate the capturing of good quality images and reduce the surgeon's
cognitive load. Nonetheless, these approaches require the tissue surface to be
static or deform with periodic motion. To eliminate these assumptions, we
propose a visual servoing framework for autonomous tissue scanning, able to
deal with free-form tissue deformation. The 3D structure of the surgical scene
is recovered and a feature-based method is proposed to estimate the motion of
the tissue in real-time. A desired scanning trajectory is manually defined on a
reference frame and continuously updated using projective geometry to follow
the tissue motion and control the movement of the robotic arm. The advantage of
the proposed method is that it does not require the learning of the tissue
motion prior to scanning and can deal with free-form deformation. We deployed
this framework on the da Vinci surgical robot using the da Vinci Research Kit
(dVRK) for Ultrasound tissue scanning. Since the framework does not rely on
information from the Ultrasound data, it can be easily extended to other
probe-based imaging modalities.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, ICRA 202
Robot Autonomy for Surgery
Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot
operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are
several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing
precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of
biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and
execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and
sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical
teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in
interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In
this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in
research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous
surgical robots
ToolNet: Holistically-Nested Real-Time Segmentation of Robotic Surgical Tools
Real-time tool segmentation from endoscopic videos is an essential part of
many computer-assisted robotic surgical systems and of critical importance in
robotic surgical data science. We propose two novel deep learning architectures
for automatic segmentation of non-rigid surgical instruments. Both methods take
advantage of automated deep-learning-based multi-scale feature extraction while
trying to maintain an accurate segmentation quality at all resolutions. The two
proposed methods encode the multi-scale constraint inside the network
architecture. The first proposed architecture enforces it by cascaded
aggregation of predictions and the second proposed network does it by means of
a holistically-nested architecture where the loss at each scale is taken into
account for the optimization process. As the proposed methods are for real-time
semantic labeling, both present a reduced number of parameters. We propose the
use of parametric rectified linear units for semantic labeling in these small
architectures to increase the regularization ability of the design and maintain
the segmentation accuracy without overfitting the training sets. We compare the
proposed architectures against state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks.
We validate our methods using existing benchmark datasets, including ex vivo
cases with phantom tissue and different robotic surgical instruments present in
the scene. Our results show a statistically significant improved Dice
Similarity Coefficient over previous instrument segmentation methods. We
analyze our design choices and discuss the key drivers for improving accuracy.Comment: Paper accepted at IROS 201
Gesture Recognition in Robotic Surgery: a Review
OBJECTIVE: Surgical activity recognition is a fundamental step in computer-assisted interventions. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in methods for automatic recognition of fine-grained gestures in robotic surgery focusing on recent data-driven approaches and outlines the open questions and future research directions. METHODS: An article search was performed on 5 bibliographic databases with combinations of the following search terms: robotic, robot-assisted, JIGSAWS, surgery, surgical, gesture, fine-grained, surgeme, action, trajectory, segmentation, recognition, parsing. Selected articles were classified based on the level of supervision required for training and divided into different groups representing major frameworks for time series analysis and data modelling. RESULTS: A total of 52 articles were reviewed. The research field is showing rapid expansion, with the majority of articles published in the last 4 years. Deep-learning-based temporal models with discriminative feature extraction and multi-modal data integration have demonstrated promising results on small surgical datasets. Currently, unsupervised methods perform significantly less well than the supervised approaches. CONCLUSION: The development of large and diverse open-source datasets of annotated demonstrations is essential for development and validation of robust solutions for surgical gesture recognition. While new strategies for discriminative feature extraction and knowledge transfer, or unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, can mitigate the need for data and labels, they have not yet been demonstrated to achieve comparable performance. Important future research directions include detection and forecast of gesture-specific errors and anomalies. SIGNIFICANCE: This paper is a comprehensive and structured analysis of surgical gesture recognition methods aiming to summarize the status of this rapidly evolving field
Unsupervised Trajectory Segmentation for Surgical Gesture Recognition in Robotic Training
International audienceDexterity and procedural knowledge are two critical skills that surgeons need to master to perform accurate and safe surgical interventions. However, current training systems do not allow us to provide an in-depth analysis of surgical gestures to precisely assess these skills. Our objective is to develop a method for the automatic and quantitative assessment of surgical gestures. To reach this goal, we propose a new unsupervised algorithm that can automatically segment kinematic data from robotic training sessions. Without relying on any prior information or model, this algorithm detects critical points in the kinematic data that define relevant spatio-temporal segments. Based on the association of these segments, we obtain an accurate recognition of the gestures involved in the surgical training task. We, then, perform an advanced analysis and assess our algorithm using datasets recorded during real expert training sessions. After comparing our approach with the manual annotations of the surgical gestures, we observe 97.4% accuracy for the learning purpose and an average matching score of 81.9% for the fully automated gesture recognition process. Our results show that trainees workflow can be followed and surgical gestures may be automatically evaluated according to an expert database. This approach tends toward improving training efficiency by minimizing the learning curve
Autonomous Camera Movement for Robotic-Assisted Surgery: A Survey
In the past decade, Robotic-Assisted Surgery (RAS) has become a widely accepted technique as an alternative to traditional open surgery procedures. The best robotic assistant system should combine both human and robot capabilities under the human control. As a matter of fact robot should collaborate with surgeons in a natural and autonomous way, thus requiring less of the surgeons\u27 attention. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and structured review of the robotic-assisted surgery and autonomous camera movement for RAS operation. We also discuss several topics, including but not limited to task and gesture recognition, that are closely related to robotic-assisted surgery automation and illustrate several successful applications in various real-world application domains. We hope that this paper will provide a more thorough understanding of the recent advances in camera automation in RSA and offer some future research directions
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