Notice of RetractionDesign, optimization and experimental evaluation of a novel tactile sensor for large surgical grasper

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

There has been a rising trend towards robotic tele-surgery operations in recent years. A major concern, however, is the lack of direct contact between the surgeon and patient´s body. Several researchers have proposed various designs of tactile sensors for surgical instruments to improve the dexterity of surgeons. Previously designed sensors, however, are mostly suitable for instruments with small contact areas. In this paper, a novel tactile sensor is introduced in integration with the teeth of a surgical grasper for large organs. It includes strain gauges embedded underneath a toothed plate, which also act as grasping teeth of the jaws of the instrument. The thickness of the plate and the geometry of the teeth were optimized using a parametric finite element analysis using ABAQUS software. The scope of the optimization was to obtain the maximum strain at the midpoint of the lower surfaces of the teeth, as the attachment site of the strain gauges, while the mechanical stresses could be tolerated. Considering a safety factor of 2.5 to avoid yielding, a thickness of 0.1 mm and a wall angulation of 60° were obtained for the plate and teeth, respectively. The maximum strain was 3.53e-4 at the midpoint of each tooth, sufficiently high to be measured using a conventional foil strain gage. A prototype of the sensor was developed and then examined experimentally. Results indicated a maximum error of 6% when measuring the total pinch force between a soft material and the grasper. With a reasonable accuracy, the s- nsor is expected to provide a good estimation of the tissue-instrument pressure distribution when it is implemented on all three jaws of the grasper.