Retinal vein cannulation is a promising approach for treating retinal vein occlusion that involves injecting medicine into the occluded vessel to dissolve the clot. The approach remains largely unexploited clinically due to surgeon limitations in detecting interaction forces between surgical tools and retinal tissue. In this paper, a dual force constraint controller for robot-assisted retinal surgery was presented to keep the tool-to-vessel forces and tool-to-sclera forces below prescribed thresholds. A cannulation tool and forceps with dual force-sensing capability were developed and used to measure force information fed into the robot controller, which was implemented on existing Steady Hand Eye Robot platforms. The robotic system facilitates retinal vein cannulation by allowing a user to grasp the target vessel with the forceps and then enter the vessel with the cannula. The system was evaluated on an eye phantom. The results showed that, while the eyeball was subjected to rotational disturbances, the proposed controller actuates the robotic manipulators to maintain the average tool-to-vessel force at 10.9 mN and 13.1 mN and the average tool-to-sclera force at 38.1 mN and 41.2 mN for the cannula and the forcpes, respectively. Such small tool-to-tissue forces are acceptable to avoid retinal tissue injury. Additionally, two clinicians participated in a preliminary user study of the bimanual cannulation demonstrating that the operation time and tool-to-tissue forces are significantly decreased when using the bimanual robotic system as compared to freehand performance.
This paper reports the development of a fully actuated body-mounted robotic assistant for MRI-guided low back pain injection. The robot is designed with a 4-DOF needle alignment module and a 2-DOF remotely actuated needle driver module. The 6-DOF fully actuated robot can operate inside the scanner bore during imaging; hence, minimizing the need of moving the patient in or out of the scanner during the procedure, and thus potentially reducing the procedure time and streamlining the workflow. The robot is built with a lightweight and compact structure that can be attached directly to the patient's lower back using straps; therefore, attenuating the effect of patient motion by moving with the patient. The novel remote actuation design of the needle driver module with beaded chain transmission can reduce the weight and profile on the patient, as well as minimize the imaging degradation caused by the actuation electronics. The free space positioning accuracy of the system was evaluated with an optical tracking system, demonstrating the mean absolute errors (MAE) of the tip position to be 0.99±0.46 mm and orientation to be 0.99±0.65°. Qualitative imaging quality evaluation was performed on a human volunteer, revealing minimal visible image degradation that should not affect the procedure. The mounting stability of the system was assessed on a human volunteer, indicating the 3D position variation of target movement with respect to the robot frame to be less than 0.7 mm.
We present a parallel robot mechanism and the constitutive laws that govern the deformation of its constituent soft actuators. Our ultimate goal is the real-time motion-correction of a patient's head deviation from a target pose where the soft actuators control the position of the patient's cranial region on a treatment machine. We describe the mechanism, derive the stress-strain constitutive laws for the individual actuators and the inverse kinematics that prescribes a given deformation, and then present simulation results that validate our mathematical formulation. Our results demonstrate deformations consistent with our radially symmetric displacement formulation under a finite elastic deformation framework.