Anthropomorphic Dual-Arm Coordinated Control for a Single-Port Surgical Robot Based on Dual-Step Optimization

Effective teleoperation of the small-scale and highly-integrated robots for single-port surgery (SPS) imposes unique control and human-robot interaction challenges. Traditional isometric teleoperation schemes mainly focus on end-to-end trajectory mapping, which is problematic when applied to SPS robotic control, especially for dual-arm coordinated operation. Inspired by the human arm configuration in boxing maneuvers, an optimized anthropomorphic coordinated control strategy based on a dual-step optimization approach is proposed. Theoretical derivation and solvability of the problem are addressed, and the effectiveness of the method is further demonstrated in detailed simulation and in-vitro experiments. The proposed control strategy has been shown to perform dexterous SPS bimanual manipulation more effectively, involving less instrument-interference and is free from singularities, thereby improving the safety and efficiency of SPS operations

A World-First Surgical Instrument for Minimally Invasive Robotically-Enabled Transplantation of Heart Patches for Myocardial Regeneration: A Brief Research Report.

Background: Patch-based approaches to regenerating damaged myocardium include epicardial surgical transplantation of heart patches. By the time this therapy is ready for widespread clinical use, it may be important that patches can be delivered via minimally invasive and robotic surgical approaches. This brief research report describes a world-first minimally invasive patch transplantation surgical device design enabled for human operation, master-slave, and fully automated robotic control. Method: Over a 12-month period (2019-20) in our multidisciplinary team we designed a surgical instrument to transplant heart patches to the epicardial surface. The device was designed for use via uni-portal or multi-portal Video-Assisted Thorascopic Surgery (VATS). For preliminary feasibility and sizing, we used a 3D printer to produce parts of a flexible resin model from a computer-aided design (CAD) software platform in preparation for more robust high-resolution metal manufacturing. Results: The instrument was designed as a sheath containing foldable arms, Conclusion: This brief research report represents a first step on a potential pathway towards minimally invasive robotic epicardial patch transplantation. For full feasibility testing, future proof-of-concept studies, and efficacy trials will be needed

Data-driven resiliency assessment of medical cyber-physical systems

Advances in computing, networking, and sensing technologies have resulted in the ubiquitous deployment of medical cyber-physical systems in various clinical and personalized settings. The increasing complexity and connectivity of such systems, the tight coupling between their cyber and physical components, and the inevitable involvement of human operators in supervision and control have introduced major challenges in ensuring system reliability, safety, and security. This dissertation takes a data-driven approach to resiliency assessment of medical cyber-physical systems. Driven by large-scale studies of real safety incidents involving medical devices, we develop techniques and tools for (i) deeper understanding of incident causes and measurement of their impacts, (ii) validation of system safety mechanisms in the presence of realistic hazard scenarios, and (iii) preemptive real-time detection of safety hazards to mitigate adverse impacts on patients. We present a framework for automated analysis of structured and unstructured data from public FDA databases on medical device recalls and adverse events. This framework allows characterization of the safety issues originated from computer failures in terms of fault classes, failure modes, and recovery actions. We develop an approach for constructing ontology models that enable automated extraction of safety-related features from unstructured text. The proposed ontology model is defined based on device-specific human-in-the-loop control structures in order to facilitate the systems-theoretic causality analysis of adverse events. Our large-scale analysis of FDA data shows that medical devices are often recalled because of failure to identify all potential safety hazards, use of safety mechanisms that have not been rigorously validated, and limited capability in real-time detection and automated mitigation of hazards. To address those problems, we develop a safety hazard injection framework for experimental validation of safety mechanisms in the presence of accidental failures and malicious attacks. To reduce the test space for safety validation, this framework uses systems-theoretic accident causality models in order to identify the critical locations within the system to target software fault injection. For mitigation of safety hazards at run time, we present a model-based analysis framework that estimates the consequences of control commands sent from the software to the physical system through real-time computation of the system’s dynamics, and preemptively detects if a command is unsafe before its adverse consequences manifest in the physical system. The proposed techniques are evaluated on a real-world cyber-physical system for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery and are shown to be more effective than existing methods in identifying system vulnerabilities and deficiencies in safety mechanisms as well as in preemptive detection of safety hazards caused by malicious attacks

State-based Safety of Component-based Medical and Surgical Robot Systems

Safety has not received sufficient attention in the medical robotics community despite a consensus of its paramount importance and the pioneering work in the early 90s. Partly because of its emergent and non-functional characteristics, it is challenging to capture and represent the design of safety features in a consistent, structured manner. In addition, significant engineering efforts are required in practice when designing and developing medical robot systems with safety. Still, academic researchers in medical robotics have to deal with safety to perform clinical studies. This dissertation presents the concept, model and architecture to reformulate safety as a visible, reusable, and verifiable property, rather than an embedded, hard-to-reuse, and hard-to-test property that is tightly coupled with the system. The concept enables reuse and structured understanding of the design of safety features, and the model allows the system designers to explicitly define and capture the run-time status of component-based systems with support for error propagation. The architecture leverages the benefits of the concept and the model by decomposing safety features into reusable mechanisms and configurable specifications. We show the concept and feasibility of the proposed methods by building an open source framework that aims to facilitate research and development of safety systems of medical robots. Using the cisst component-based framework, we empirically evaluate the proposed methods by applying the developed framework to two research systems -- one based on a commercial robot system for orthopedic surgery and another robot soon to be clinically applied for manipulation of flexible endoscopes

Medical Ultrasound Imaging and Interventional Component (MUSiiC) Framework for Advanced Ultrasound Image-guided Therapy

Medical ultrasound (US) imaging is a popular and convenient medical imaging modality thanks to its mobility, non-ionizing radiation, ease-of-use, and real-time data acquisition. Conventional US brightness mode (B-Mode) is one type of diagnostic medical imaging modality that represents tissue morphology by collecting and displaying the intensity information of a reflected acoustic wave. Moreover, US B-Mode imaging is frequently integrated with tracking systems and robotic systems in image-guided therapy (IGT) systems. Recently, these systems have also begun to incorporate advanced US imaging such as US elasticity imaging, photoacoustic imaging, and thermal imaging. Several software frameworks and toolkits have been developed for US imaging research and the integration of US data acquisition, processing and display with existing IGT systems. However, there is no software framework or toolkit that supports advanced US imaging research and advanced US IGT systems by providing low-level US data (channel data or radio-frequency (RF) data) essential for advanced US imaging. In this dissertation, we propose a new medical US imaging and interventional component framework for advanced US image-guided therapy based on networkdistributed modularity, real-time computation and communication, and open-interface design specifications. Consequently, the framework can provide a modular research environment by supporting communication interfaces between heterogeneous systems to allow for flexible interventional US imaging research, and easy reconfiguration of an entire interventional US imaging system by adding or removing devices or equipment specific to each therapy. In addition, our proposed framework offers real-time synchronization between data from multiple data acquisition devices for advanced iii interventional US imaging research and integration of the US imaging system with other IGT systems. Moreover, we can easily implement and test new advanced ultrasound imaging techniques inside the proposed framework in real-time because our software framework is designed and optimized for advanced ultrasound research. The system’s flexibility, real-time performance, and open-interface are demonstrated and evaluated through performing experimental tests for several applications

Advanced Strategies for Robot Manipulators

Amongst the robotic systems, robot manipulators have proven themselves to be of increasing importance and are widely adopted to substitute for human in repetitive and/or hazardous tasks. Modern manipulators are designed complicatedly and need to do more precise, crucial and critical tasks. So, the simple traditional control methods cannot be efficient, and advanced control strategies with considering special constraints are needed to establish. In spite of the fact that groundbreaking researches have been carried out in this realm until now, there are still many novel aspects which have to be explored