Patient positioning by visualising surgical robot rotational workspace in augmented reality

ABSTRACT

Surgical robots have been the focal point of minimally invasive approaches in the last decades, gradually changing laparoscopic procedures. Robotic platforms offer many advantages that assist the surgeon, including a magnified view of the operative field, motion stability, and 3D visualisation.

Understanding the characteristics and limitations of the robot’s workspace is crucial for a successful intervention. Proper positioning of the patient with respect to the robot ensures optimal intraoperative reachability of the desired target regions by the robot and eliminates the need to reposition.

In this work, we present a workspace visualisation system using augmented reality. We aim to assist the user wearing a head-mounted display with placing the patient in an optimal position in preparation for the robotic surgery. We evaluated three possible modes of presenting rotational workspace information to the user and quantitatively assessed the placement accuracy. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the implemented solution to increase the robot’s effective range of motion at the surgical port location.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer-assisted surgery
• patient positioning
• augmented reality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Werner Siemens Foundation through the MIRACLE project.

Notes on contributors

Marek Żelechowski

Marek Żelechowski graduated in 2014 from Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) with bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering. Starting in 2013 he worked as a Field Service Engineer for Philips Healthcare in patient monitoring division, at the same time pursuing MSc degree in the same field. Late 2014, he moved to United Kingdom to start master’s studies at Cranfield University in Biomedical Engineering, where he focused on medical devices development. His Master’s thesis research, conducted at Translational Neural Engineering Lab at EPFL, concerned development of interfaces for bidirectional neuroprosthesis. Later, Marek went back to Poland to complete his project on patient home monitoring system at Warsaw University of Technology. In early 2016, after graduation he joined Field Installation Team of Philips Healthcare for EMEA region, where he worked until October. In December 2016, he joined Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Basel, where he worked on various projects involving image recognition and virtual reality. In August 2017, he started his Ph.D. studies at the Planning and Navigation group of Prof. Philippe C. Cattin, where he works on integration of augmented reality in surgical scenarios.

Murali Karnam

Murali Karnam completed B.Tech in mechatronics, and received M.S. in robotics from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, India, in 2014. Later he worked as a research assistant at IIT Madras, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and Instituto Superior Técnico Lisboa, Portugal. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Basel, Switzerland at the BIROMED-Lab. His research interests include physical human-robot interaction, robot kinematics and dynamics, and medical robotics.

Balázs Faludi

Balázs Faludi is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Basel. He studied computer science with a focus on computer networks and named data networking at the University of Basel where he received his M.Sc. degree in 2016. Subsequently he was working as a research assistant at the Computer Networks group of Prof. Christian Tschudin. In October 2017 he started his Ph.D. studies at the Planning and Navigation group of Prof. Philippe C. Cattin where is working on different applications of virtual reality in the medical field, such as surgical planning, training, and simulation.

Nicolas Gerig

Nicolas Gerig completed his master’s in mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich. For his master thesis he joined the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (Pensacola, FL) to work on fall prevention of a robotic leg orthosis. Afterwards, he received his PhD (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) developing a virtual trainer for robot-assisted movement training at the Sensory-Motor Systems Lab, ETH Zurich. Further, he was head of the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) race at the Cybathlon 2016 and is an active member of the Cybathlon advisory board. He is member of International Consortium of Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) and alumni of the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems. Since April 2018, he is deputy head of the BIROMED-Lab at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Basel, Switzerland. His current research focuses on developing novel robotic surgery platforms for the MIRACLE project (Minimally Invasive Robot-Assisted Computer-guided LaserostetomE).

Georg Rauter

Georg Rauter is Assistant Professor for Medical Robotics and Mechatronics at the Bio-Inspired Robots for MEDicine-Lab (BIROMED-Lab) at the Department of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Basel. As head of the BIROMED-Lab, he leads one of the four research groups of the Department’s flagship project on Minimally Invasive Robot-Assisted Computer-guided LaserosteotomE (MIRACLE Project). Georg Rauter received his Ph.D. at the ETH Zurich in the field of robot-assisted multimodal human motor learning and has a background in Mechatronics in Mechanical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing.at TU Graz) and Mathematical and Mechanical Modeling (Ing. Dipl. at the Université Bordeaux).

Philippe C. Cattin

Philippe C. Cattin received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Applied Science in Brugg/Windisch in 1991. In 1995 he received the M.Sc. degree*in *computer science and in 2003 the Ph.D. degree in robotics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. From 2003 to 2007 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich. In 2007 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015. He is the founder of the Medical Image Analysis Center at the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel. He is currently the head of the recently founded Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel. His research interests include medical image analysis, image-guided therapy, and robotics-guided laser osteotomy. As a Principal Investigator he has finished many projects in these areas and published over 100 papers, patents, and book chapter.