The use of robots in health care has increased dramatically over the last decade. One area of research has been to use robots to conduct ultrasound examinations, either controlled by a physician or autonomously. This paper examines the possibility of using the commercial robot UR5 from Universal Robots to make a tele-operated robotic ultrasound system. Physicians diagnosing patients using ultrasound probes are prone to repetitive strain injuries, as they are required to hold the probe in uncomfortable positions and exert significant static force. The main application for the system is to relieve the physician of this strain by letting the them control a robot that holds the probe. A set of requirements for the system is derived from the state-of-the-art systems found in the research literature. The system is developed through a low-level interface for the robot, effectively building a new software framework for controlling it. Compliance force control and forward flow haptic control of the robot was implemented. Experiments are conducted to quantify the performance of the two control schemes. The force control is estimated to have a bandwidth of 16.6 Hz, while the haptic control is estimated to have a bandwidth of 65.4 Hz for the position control of the slave and 13.4 Hz for the force control of the master. Overall, the system meets the derived requirements and the main conclusion is that it is feasible to use the UR5 robot for robotic ultrasound applications.

The introduction of minimally invasive surgery has demonstrated the need for training surgical skills outside the operating room using animal models or simulators. As laparoscopic surgery involves displaying images on a screen, virtual reality simulation of the surgical tasks is feasible. Different types of simulators have become available. The existing trainers can be divided into three groups: mechanical, hybrid, and virtual reality. This article aims at giving an overview of the different simulators available and the potential of simulators in the education of surgeons with focus on virtual reality simulators. All simulators aim at training psychomotoric skills and some simulators also allow training in decision-making and anatomical orientation. In the future virtual reality simulators may become a tool for training and validation of surgical skills and monitoring the training progress.

Laparoscopic videos can be affected by different distortions which may impact the performance of surgery and introduce surgical errors. In this work, we propose a framework for automatically detecting and identifying such distortions and their severity using video quality assessment. There are three major contributions presented in this work (i) a proposal for a novel video enhancement framework for laparoscopic surgery; (ii) a publicly available database for quality assessment of laparoscopic videos evaluated by expert as well as non-expert observers and (iii) objective video quality assessment of laparoscopic videos including their correlations with expert and non-expert scores.