Instrument Interactions as Source of Information in Robot-Assisted Surgery

The interaction between the surgical instrument and tissue is a yet little-exploited source of information. Vibroacoustic signals resulting from an interaction can be analyzed to extract relevant information related to the tissue. This work presents a summary of feasibility studies with synthetic-, animal-, and ex-vivo tissue specimen. A standard palpation probe is equipped with a vibration measurement system. A manual and robot-assisted setup is used for data acquisition. Simple features derived from the signals are used in a subsequent classification step using kNN and SVM. The obtained results show the capability to differentiate various tissues, such as subchondral bone with an accuracy of 98.44%. This demonstrates the potential of the approach to provide tissue related information based on instrument interactions.