title: Effect of sensory substitution on suture manipulation forces for surgical teleoperation.
abstract: Bilateral telemanipulation, which applies haptic feedback to the operator, is not yet available in most commercial robot-assisted surgical systems. We have shown in previous work that the lack of haptic (force or tactile) feedback is detrimental in applications requiring fine suture manipulation. In this paper, we study the effect of substituting direct haptic feedback with visual and auditory cues. Using the da Vinci robot from Intuitive Surgical, we observed the difference between applied forces during a knot tying procedure for four different sensory feedback substitution scenarios: no feedback, auditory feedback, visual feedback, and a combination of auditory and visual feedback. Our results indicate that visual feedback, which provides continuous force information, would improve robot-assisted performance during complex surgical tasks such as knot tying with fine sutures. Discrete auditory feedback gives additional useful support to the surgeon.
authors.affiliation: Johns Hopkins University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 223 Latrobe Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. mkitagawa@jhu.edu
authors.forename: Masaya
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kitagawa
authors.forename: Daniell
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dokko
authors.forename: Allison M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Okamura
authors.forename: Brian T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Bethea
authors.forename: David D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Yuh
mesh_terms: D005246:Feedback; D012371:Robotics; D013514:Surgical Procedures, Operative; D013537:Sutures; D017216:Telemedicine; D014481:United States; D014584:User-Computer Interface