IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015 - 12

patient-specific design in combination
with 3-D printing, it is possible to rapidly
design and manufacture cost-effective disposable robotic tools that are optimized
for use in a particular patient. Furthermore, the tools can be customized for a
particular surgeon and made compatible
with equipment available at a particular
operating room. This custom 3-D printed
approach has the potential to transform
surgical tool creation into a patient-specific activity. The robot demonstrated the
high level of dexterity that can be achieved
with a 3-D printed surgical robot.
To aid the construction of personalized stent grafts, a stent manufacturing
robot was presented at the event. Currently, personalized stent grafts, particularly those with fenestration, are
manufactured by hand. Due to the complex morphology of stent grafts, this process can take many weeks and cost tens of
thousands of U.S. dollars. The availability
of a robot capable of automating this process could reduce the cost, enabling more

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

patients to benefit from these life-saving
implants and reduce the delay before
stent grafts can be deployed, thereby saving lives. It was demonstrated how the
robot could learn to perform a stitch
from observing a human operator and
then repeat the task automatically using
multirobot cooperation.
Eye tracking provides a mechanism
for determining where a surgeon's visual attention is. A system developed at
the University of British Columbia,
Canada, was presented at the event that
used eye tracking to help guide the
motion of surgical tools. The technique
showed promise for making tool control more intuitive by integrating eye
fixation positions with hand motion.
Cardiac motion can pose a significant
challenge for minimally invasive procedures. When operating on or near to the
heart, the surgeon must constantly consider its periodic yet variable motion.
Simple actions, such as cutting or suturing, must be augmented with the under-

DECEMBER 2015

lying cardiac motion to prevent tissue and
vessel damage. To alleviate the problems
associated with cardiac motion during
surgery, a team from the University of
British Columbia presented a motion
compensation scheme that subtracts the
cardiac motion from the digital view presented to the surgeon and augments the
motion of the minimally invasive tools.
The technique was demonstrated with
synthetic surgical tasks with motion data
acquired from a healthy human subject.
A team from Imperial College presented a tendon-driven robot for neurosurgery that is able to mimic the actions
of the surgeon's thumb and forefinger.
The robot interfaces the KUKA robot
arm and allows the surgeon to scale
their actions from large movements into
precise tissue control at the surgical site.
Training for robotic surgery typically
requires access to expensive hardware.
A low-cost training device was presented at the event that mimics the ergonomics of the daVinci surgical robot
allowing surgeon's to practice surgical
skills in a simulated environment. The
device can fit in a hand-luggage suitcase
and was set up and ready to train in
under 5 min. The training device was
demonstrated for a range of surgical
tasks, including cutting and suturing.
Other entries of the competition
included a robotic platform that uses
active constraints and vibration feedback
to assist the surgeon with tool control,
introduction of haptic feedback and automated task execution with the Raven surgical robot, customized tools and
multirobot coordination, and an expandable/collapsible cuff for single-port surgery.
Finally, a vision-guided suturing
robot system from Johns Hopkins,
Maryland, was presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the robotic controlled stitching in comparison with the
traditional laparoscopic suturing. Similarly, vision-guided systems for intraoperative ultrasound-guided tissue dissection by innovative use of waterjet and
Argon plasma coagulation in the management gastrointestinal hemorrhage
were presented. These demonstrations
provided an insight into how human-
robot cooperative control could be used
to introduce automation during surgery

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015