Abstract This work demonstrates the detection and identification of pulsatile activity using proximal vibroacoustic sensing in laparoscopic instruments. A controlled setup simulating vascular pulsations was used to evaluate two signal processing methods: Continuous Wavelet Transform and autocorrelation. Both approaches identified pulsations up to 2 cm deep with high accuracy. These findings support the exploration of proximal sensing for intraoperative identification of vascular structures in robot-assisted surgery, where direct haptic feedback is absent and visual cues may be insufficient.
Espejo et al. (Mon,) studied this question.