title: Experimental evaluation of magnified haptic feedback for robot-assisted needle insertion and palpation.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Haptic feedback has been proven to play a key role in enhancing the performance of teleoperated medical procedures. However, due to safety issues, commercially-available medical robots do not currently provide the clinician with haptic feedback.
  
  
  METHODS
  This work presents the experimental evaluation of a teleoperation system for robot-assisted medical procedures able to provide magnified haptic feedback to the clinician. Forces registered at the operating table are magnified and provided to the clinician through a 7-DoF haptic interface. The same interface is also used to control the motion of a 6-DoF slave robotic manipulator. The safety of the system is guaranteed by a time-domain passivity-based control algorithm.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Two experiments were carried out on stiffness discrimination (during palpation and needle insertion) and one experiment on needle guidance.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our haptic-enabled teleoperation system improved the performance with respect to direct hand interaction of 80%, 306%, and 27% in stiffness discrimination through palpation, stiffness discrimination during needle insertion, and guidance, respectively.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy.|Dept. of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, Siena, Italy.
authors.forename: Leonardo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Meli
authors.affiliation: CNRS at Irisa and Inria Rennes, Rennes, France.
authors.forename: Claudio
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8006-9168
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pacchierotti
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy.|Dept. of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, Siena, Italy.
authors.forename: Domenico
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Prattichizzo
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D004867:Equipment Design; D005246:Feedback; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008099:Liver; D008297:Male; D009038:Motion; D009339:Needles; D010173:Palpation; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D065287:Robotic Surgical Procedures / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D012371:Robotics; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D013552:Swine; D017216:Telemedicine; D014421:Turkey; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: haptics; minimally-invasive surgery; navigation; needle insertion; safety; telesurgery