Enhancing the Localization of Uterine Leiomyomas Through Cutaneous Softness Rendering for Robot-Assisted Surgical Palpation Applications

Integrating tactile feedback for lump localization in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) represents an open research issue, which is still far to be solved. Main reasons for this are related e.g. to the need for a transparent connection with the teleoperating console, and an intuitive decoding of the delivered information. In this article, we focus on the specific case of RMIS treatment of uterine leiomyomas or fibroids, where little has been done in haptics to improve the outcomes of robotics-enabled palpation tasks. In this article, we propose the usage of a wearable haptic interface for softness rendering as a lump display. The device was integrated in a teleoperation architecture that simulates a robot-assisted surgical palpation task of leiomyomas. This article moved from an ex-vivo sample characterization of uterine tissues to show the effectiveness of our interface in conveying meaningful softness information. We extensively tested our system with gynecologic surgeons in palpation tasks with silicone specimens, which replicated the characteristics of uterine tissues with embedded leyomiomas. Results show that our system enables a softness-based discrimination of the embedded fibroids comparable to the one that physicians would achieve using directly their fingers in palpation tasks. Furthermore, the feedback provided by the haptic interface was perceived as comfortable, intuitive, and highly useful for fibroid localization.