A method of decreasing time delay for a tele-surgery system

The haptics-based master-slave system for Minimally Invasive Surgery is a promising way to protect surgeons from long time radiation and to train novice doctors to learn basic wire or catheter handling skills. However, the time delay of transmission of visual video and the time difference between image information and force signals restrict the application of this technology in some extent. In this paper, we proposed a new method to reduce time delay effectively. At the slave side, the tip of the active catheter is tracked in real time to provide information on the location of the catheter in the blood vessel model. And then transmitted the coordinate values to the master site. At the master site, the location of the catheter was reappeared in the navigation chart which is the same structure with the blood vessels at master side according to the coordinate values received from the slave side. Therefore the transmission time of image information is decreased. Experimental results are given to illustrate the accuracy of our method.