Intelligent interaction between surgeon and laparoscopic assistant robot system

This paper proposes an intelligent interaction architecture to develop a compact robotic assistant which is operable with minimal control burden. The interaction architecture provides the viewpoint of a laparoscope based on a surgery model and environmental information and an operating surgeon can modify the viewpoint with voice commands, if needed. For this purpose, cholecystectomy is modeled with state-transition diagram through the analysis of four human cholecystectomies. The surgery model for the laparoscopic assistant robot includes a sequence of surgical procedures, surgical instruments in use and proper camera view point at each stage. The camera view information is utilized to obtain the tip position and the type of surgical instrument in use. Surgeon´s voice commands are used to modify the camera view suggested by the proposed architecture. The proposed interaction scheme is implemented using the KaLAR system and evaluated through in vivo porcine cholecystectomy.