Performance Envelope and Physiological Tremor in Microsurgery

Using an instrumented surgical tool, high-precision recordings of hand tremor were taken during vitreoretinal microsurgery in a rabbit model in vivo. The data obtained using a compact, custom six-degree-of-freedom inertial sensing module were filtered and analyzed to characterize the physiological hand tremor of the surgeon. Tremor during the most delicate part of the procedure was measured at a vector magnitude of 30 μm rms. Non-tremulous, lower-frequency components of instrument movement were also characterized. The data collected provide an important baseline for design specification and performance evaluation of microsurgical devices, using a more comprehensive data set than has been evaluated previously.