Spatial motion constraints for a minimally invasive surgical robot using customizable virtual fixtures

Background A surgeon performs various surgical actions with the help of teleoperation technology during robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. The slave manipulators reproduce every movement of the surgeon's hands, completely and faithfully. However, in some cases, unexpected collisions between surgical instruments and fragile organs might occur around the lesion, causing further injury. Method Marking critical areas near the surface of each vulnerable organ and generating virtual fixtures, based on which to constrain the slave manipulator motion to prevent any unexpected collision. Result Virtual fixtures can be easily defined using the proposed method before or even during the surgery as the surgeon wishes. The experimental results show that the virtual fixtures can protect the organs very well during surgical manipulation. Conclusion The proposed method can easily be applied to any master–slave minimally invasive surgical (MIS) robotic system to increase the safety of robot-assisted surgery.