Design and Integration of Electrical Bio-impedance Sensing in Surgical Robotic Tools for Tissue Identification and Display

Abstract

The integration of intra-operative sensors into surgical robots is a hot research topic since this can significantly facilitate complex surgical procedures by enhancing surgical awareness with real-time tissue information. However, currently available intra-operative sensing technologies are mainly based on image processing and force feedback, which normally require heavy computation or complicated hardware modifications of existing surgical tools. This paper presents the design and integration of electrical bio-impedance sensing into a commercial surgical robot tool, leading to the creation of a novel smart instrument that allows the identification of tissues by simply touching them. In addition, an advanced user interface is designed to provide guidance during the use of the system and to allow augmented-reality visualization of the tissue identification results. The proposed system imposes minor hardware modifications to an existing surgical tool, but adds the capability to provide a wealth of data about the tissue being manipulated. This has great potential to allow the surgeon (or an autonomous robotic system) to better understand the surgical environment. To evaluate the system, a series of ex-vivo experiments were conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed sensing system can successfully identify different tissue types with 100% classification accuracy. In addition, the user interface was shown to effectively and intuitively guide the user to measure the electrical impedance of the target tissue, presenting the identification results as augmented-reality markers for simple and immediate recognition.

The Advances in Computer Vision That Are Enabling More Autonomous Actions in Surgery: A Systematic Review of the Literature

“…Additionally, these types of data could give pixel data another dimension and theoretically improve computers and robots ability to safely perform autonomous tasks [76,77]. Alternative techniques devised to allow for the differentiation of tissues during surgery involve the utilization of electrical bio-impedance sensing and analysis of force feedback, but are still in the prototype phase [78].…”

Lymph Node Detection Using Robot Assisted Electrical Impedance Scanning and an Artificial Neural Network

“…Compared to the bipolar configuration which has concentrated sensitivity on tissue superficial layer [9,10], the tripolar sensing configuration of the RAEIS system can achieve a more stable impedance measurement thanks to the integrated controlled current source and high input impedance for signal pickup [8]. Please refer to [11] for more discussions regarding the comparison between bipolar and tripolar sensing.…”

An Electrical Bioimpedance Scanning System for Subsurface Tissue Detection in Robot Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

“…Our previous studies [25,26] have successfully integrated the EBI sensing into a surgical robot for real time intra-operative tissue identification. However, since a bi-polar EBI sensing method is used, the reliability of EBI sensing depends on a precise control of the contacting area between the sensing electrode and the tissue [27]. This is generally difficult due to tissue deformation.…”