Skin-stretch Haptic Feedback Augmentation Improves Performance in a Simulated Laparoscopic Palpation Task.

Laparoscopic surgery brings substantial benefits to patients. However, it remains challenging for surgeons because of motion constraints and perception limitations. Notably, the perception of interactions with organs is largely compromised.

Adaptative damping assistance in bimanual laparoscopic surgery.

Purpose: Laparoscopic surgery has demonstrated various advantages for the patients' care, but also presents some difficulties for the surgeons, such as kinematic restrictions. Robotic comanipulation, in which control of instruments is shared between the robot and the surgeon, can provide adaptative damping assistance which allows stabilisation of movements. The objective of the present study was to determine the contribution of this assistance on a bimanual laparoscopic task.

Real Time Estimator to Perform Targeted Biopsies With a Free-Wrist Robot Despite Large Deformations of the Insertion Orifice.

In the context of keyhole surgery, and more particularly of uterine biopsy, the fine automatic movements of a surgical instrument held by a robot with 3 active DOF's require an exact knowledge of the point of rotation of the instrument. However, this center of rotation is not fixed and moves during an examination. This paper deals with a new method of detecting and updating the interaction matrix linking the movements of the robot with the surgical instrument.

Precisely positioning the tip of an instrument inserted through an orifice with a free wrist robot: application to prostate biopsies.

Purpose: Robots with a spherical unactuated wrist can be used for minimally invasive surgery. With such a robot, positioning the wrist center controls the instrument tip position when assuming that the insertion site behaves like a lever with a fixed and known fulcrum. In practice, this assumption is not always respected.

Prostate biopsies assisted by comanipulated probe-holder: first in man.

Purpose: A comanipulator for assisting endorectal prostate biopsies is evaluated through a first-in-man clinical trial. This lightweight system, based on conventional robotic components, possesses six degrees of freedom. It uses three electric motors and three brakes.

Robot guidance of an ultrasound probe toward a 3D region of interest detected through X-ray mammography.

Purpose: This research is situated in the context of breast cancer detection where the standard procedure is the succession of an initial mammography (MX) examination and a supplementary ultrasound (US) scan. One major difficulty of this procedure results from the fact that breast geometry changes between both examinations due to different patient's positions. The proposed system facilitates this combined examination by keeping the breast geometry and by adding a US probe guidance robot to the mammography system.

Underactuated comanipulation for ultrasound breast exams.

We investigate the possibility of providing adequate task assistance using under-actuated robots for human-robot tool co-manipulation. This novel approach optimizes robot-user synergy without taking into account any a priori knowledge of parameters depending on the user. Six different actuation modes were compared for a localization and scanning task.