Soft tissue overload prevention based on patient-specific biomechanical modelling in robotic minimally invasive surgery.

Current systems for conventional or robotic minimally invasive surgery do not measure the interaction forces between the surgical tool and the manipulated tissues. This lack of information has been known to induce unwanted tissue damage. In this project, a force measurement system will be developed and integrated into the robotic surgical system. Moreover, while processing this acquired information, the mechanical behaviour of biological soft tissue will be taken into account, providing information about the stresses and strains that are induced. Instead of pure force feedback, this will enable the feedback of intelligent information to the surgeon, such as safety thresholds, thus preventing damage to the tissue. Several challenges will be tackled, an important one being the design of a compact and sterilizable force measurement system. Because safety thresholds can only be defined related to local tissue stresses and strains, the acquired instrument forces and displacements will be translated to these local tissue stresses and strains by means of biomechanical models. Due the typical geometric and mechanical variability of biological tissue, it is necessary to make these models patient-specific. Moreover they should be able to process the force- and displacement information in realtime, to provide continuously varying safety thresholds to the teleoperation control system.

Keywords:Robotic surgery, Finite element modeling, Teleoperation, Optical fibres, Haptic feedback, Safety thresholds

Disciplines:Biomechanics, Biological system engineering, Biomaterials engineering, Biomechanical engineering, Medical biotechnology, Other (bio)medical engineering, Control systems, robotics and automation, Design theories and methods, Mechatronics and robotics, Computer theory