A Confidence-Based Shared Control Strategy for the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR)

Abstract

Autonomous robotic assisted surgery (RAS) systems aim to reduce human errors and improve patient outcomes leveraging robotic accuracy and repeatability during surgical procedures. However, full automation of RAS in complex surgical environments is still not feasible and collaboration with the surgeon is required for safe and effective use. In this work, we utilize our Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) to develop and evaluate a shared control strategy for the collaboration of the robot with a human operator in surgical scenarios. We consider 2D pattern cutting tasks with partial blood occlusion of the cutting pattern using a robotic electrocautery tool. For this surgical task and RAS system, we i) develop a confidence-based shared control strategy, ii) assess the pattern tracking performances of manual and autonomous controls and identify the confidence models for human and robot as well as a confidence-based control allocation function, and iii) experimentally evaluate the accuracy of our proposed shared control strategy. In our experiments on porcine fat samples, by combining the best elements of autonomous robot controller with complementary skills of a human operator, our proposed control strategy improved the cutting accuracy by 6.4%, while reducing the operator work time to 44 % compared to a pure manual control.

Computational healthcare: Present and future perspectives (Review)

“…In addition, real-time predictions are also being made with recurrent neural networks (39). Conventional surgical robots are operated by a physician; however, surgical robots that work automatically without operation by a physician are also being developed (40). Thus, the development of AI has also led to the development of robots that support physicians during surgery.…”

Review of Advanced Medical Telerobots

“…The linear blending approach also increases efficiency; Saeidi et al demonstrated in [345] that a 2D-pattern cutting task with partial blood occlusion could result in a work time diminution compared to a fully manual task. This experiment highlighted the interest of a confidence-based shared control strategy with an adaptive blending.…”

Shared‐control design for robot‐assisted surgery using a skill assessment approach

“…Continuous Hidden Markov Model (CHMM) was used to learn surgeon's movement and automatically generate trajectories when performing a surgery. Saeidi et al [14] proposed a shared‐control strategy, which had a confidence evaluation model for the manual control and autonomous control. The most reliable source of control would be given the full control weight.…”

“…The adjustment of shared‐control weights is achieved through online assessment of surgeon's skill level and dynamic weight allocation to enable the robot autonomy to assist a surgeon properly. The weights will be adjusted progressively between 0 and 1 to eliminate the effects of switching among surgical operations [14].…”