Optical-Waveguide Based Tactile Sensing for Surgical Instruments of Minimally Invasive Surgery

TY - JOUR

T1 - Optical-Waveguide Based Tactile Sensing for Surgical Instruments of Minimally Invasive Surgery

AU - Li, Yue

AU - Hu, Jian

AU - Cao, Danqian

AU - Wang, Stephen

AU - Dasgupta, Prokar

AU - Liu, Hongbin

N1 - Funding Information: YL and DC received support from China Scholarship Council. (CSC NO. 202006280025) and (CSC NO. 201906340220). Funding Information: The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors declare that this study received funding from Huawei Technologies R&D UK Ltd. The funder had the following involvement in the study: Idea discussion and paper preparations. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2022 Li, Hu, Cao, Wang, Dasgupta and Liu.

PY - 2022/1/19

Y1 - 2022/1/19

N2 - In recent years, with the rapid development of minimally invasive surgery (MIS), the lack of force sensing associated with the surgical instrument used in MIS has been increasingly a desirable technology amongst clinicians. However, it is still an open technical challenge to date since most existing tactile sensing principles are not suitable to small 3-dimensional (3D) curved surfaces often seen in surgical instruments, and as a result multi-point force detection cannot be realized. In this paper, a novel optical waveguide-based sensor was proposed to deal with the above research gap. A sensor prototype for curved surfaces resembling the surface of dissection forceps was developed and experimentally evaluated. The static parameters and dynamic response characteristics of the sensor were measured. Results show that the static hysteresis error is less than 3%, the resolution is 0.026 N, and the repeatability is less than 1.5%. Under a frequency of 12.5 Hz, the sensor could quickly measure the variation of the force signal. We demonstrated that this small and high-precision sensitive sensor design is promising to be used for creating multiple-point tactile sensing for minimally invasive surgical instruments with 3D surfaces.

AB - In recent years, with the rapid development of minimally invasive surgery (MIS), the lack of force sensing associated with the surgical instrument used in MIS has been increasingly a desirable technology amongst clinicians. However, it is still an open technical challenge to date since most existing tactile sensing principles are not suitable to small 3-dimensional (3D) curved surfaces often seen in surgical instruments, and as a result multi-point force detection cannot be realized. In this paper, a novel optical waveguide-based sensor was proposed to deal with the above research gap. A sensor prototype for curved surfaces resembling the surface of dissection forceps was developed and experimentally evaluated. The static parameters and dynamic response characteristics of the sensor were measured. Results show that the static hysteresis error is less than 3%, the resolution is 0.026 N, and the repeatability is less than 1.5%. Under a frequency of 12.5 Hz, the sensor could quickly measure the variation of the force signal. We demonstrated that this small and high-precision sensitive sensor design is promising to be used for creating multiple-point tactile sensing for minimally invasive surgical instruments with 3D surfaces.

KW - 3D surface

KW - minimally invasive surgical

KW - multi-point force measurement

KW - optical sensor

KW - tactile sensor

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124019174&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3389/frobt.2021.773166

DO - 10.3389/frobt.2021.773166

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85124019174

SN - 2296-9144

VL - 8

JO - Front. Robot. AI

JF - Front. Robot. AI

M1 - 773166

ER -