Surgical robots with complex maneuvering capabilities are able to perform surgery less invasively by entering the body through tiny incisions, resulting in decreased blood loss, significantly shorter recovery time, and decreased overall healthcare costs compared to traditional open surgery. However, a major technological hurdle prevents their widespread adoption; namely, that current surgical robots are unable to provide surgeons with an adequate sense of tactile perception, or a sense of the forces being exerted on the tissue by surgical instruments. Surgeons use tactile perception to know how to manipulate tissue without causing damage and assess tissue stiffness to determine tissue type. The lack of tactile perception creates a risk of unnecessary tissue damage; often, this risk outweighs the potential benefits of robotic surgery. Other designs attempting to surmount this deficiency lack the ability to functionally integrate into endoscopic tools, have inadequate measurement resolution over bulk tissue mass, and/or have low upper limits of pressure ranges. Until these concerns are addressed and resolved, large-scale robotic surgery is only a distant possibility.
Left: model of a sensorized grasper gripping tissue at the edge of a tumor; the four most distal sensors measure more force due to the stiffness of the neoplastic tissue. Right: model of a sensorized grasper gripping a section of tissue containing a small artery. The underlying sensors relay the pulsations to the surgeon’s fingertips.
Description
TactSense is a novel system capable of sensing forces at the robot-tissue interface and then relaying that information directly to the surgeon’s fingertips as a means of introducing tactile feedback. The TactSense system is comprised of a set of surgical instruments with a standard patentable design that integrate pressure sensors at strategic locations within the tool joined with a patentable joystick control system that uses electromechanical actuation to “push back” at the surgeon’s fingertips to recreate the sensation of pressure applied to tissue by the surgical tool. Compared to other designs, our pressure sensors provide more accurate micro-pressure sensors to provide accurate, repeatable pressure distribution data across the face of the tool. With fully-integrated tools, high-resolution pressure data, surgeons will be able to feel at their fingertips important surgical cues such as the pulsation of an artery, the compliance properties of different tissues, and the force with which they are grasping or pulling tissues.
Applications
· Performing surgery via robots and decreasing the invasiveness, risk of blood loss, recovery time, and healthcare costs of traditional open surgery.
Advantages
· High pressure measurement resolution prevents surgeons from generalizing stiffness to a large tissue region
· Endoscopic tools are fully integrable with robotic surgery
· Higher upper limits of detectable pressure ranges compared to other designs
Invention Readiness
Prototype
IP Status
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9592093B2Related Publication(s)
Johnson, P. J., Schmidt, D. E., & Duvvuri, U. (2014). Output control of da Vinci surgical system’s surgical graspers. Journal of Surgical Research, 186(1), 56–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2013.07.032
