Robotic assistance for improving surgeries and therapies

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The purpose of this proposal is to improve the existing technology and develop new technologies for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery and therapy that will reduce the burden on Canada's healthcare system by making surgeries and therapies more efficient and less traumatic and the hospital stays shorter. In robot-assisted soft-tissue surgeries, it is important to deliver haptic feedback (sensation of touch) about robot/patient contact forces to the surgeon's hand in order to enable better control over the forces and to prevent tissue damage. The proposed research focuses on various aspects of developing a satisfactory solution to the problem of lack of haptic feedback in current robot-assisted surgical and telesurgical systems. Specifically, focusing on the haptics technology bottlenecks, we plan to address the limitations caused by the electrical or mechanical imperfections of current surgical systems (tool flexibility, communication delay, robot joint's backlash and friction, etc.) both in terms of the surgical system's performance and characteristics and in terms of how well surgical examination and manipulation tasks can be performed using the system. While the benefits of minimally invasive methods to patients and the healthcare system are clear, we will magnify them by addressing the difficulties of robot-assisted surgery and by training HQP in the area. In addition, the research plans to develop new technologies that would enable a surgeon to use a robot-assisted surgical system for intracardiac surgery on the beating heart. The current practice is to stop the heart as heart motions are highly disturbing to the surgeon during the operation. For beating heart surgery to become possible, the key idea is to control a surgical robot such that it continuously follows the heart movements -- the beating heart will then seem steady to the surgeon. The proposed research will first look at real-time tracking of heart tissue structures within three-dimensional ultrasound images. The result, the tracked trajectory of a cardiac target in space, will be used to synchronize the surgical robot with the heart motions. The significance of the research is in that, unlike arrested-heart surgery, beating heart surgery will not involve cardiopulmonary bypass.