Motor Channelling for Safe and Effective Dynamic Constraints in Minimally Invasive Surgery

Motor channelling is a concept to provide navigation and sensory feedback to operators in master-slave surgical setups. It is beneficial since the introduction of robotic surgery creates a physical separation between the surgeon and patient anatomy. Active Constraints/Virtual Fixtures are proposed which integrate Guidance and Forbidden Region Constraints into a unified control framework. The developed approach provides guidance and safe manipulation to improve precision and reduce the risk of inadvertent tissue damage. Online three-degree-of-freedom motion prediction and compensation of the target anatomy is performed to complement the master constraints. The presented Active Constraints concept is applied to two clinical scenarios; surface scanning for in situ medical imaging and vessel manipulation in cardiac surgery. The proposed motor channelling control strategy is implemented on the da Vinci Surgical System using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) and its effectiveness is demonstrated through a detailed user study.