A surgical knowledge based interaction method for a laparoscopic assistant robot

This work presents a surgeon-robot interaction method for a laparoscopic assistant robot. The ultimate goal of our research is to develop an assistant robot that can replace a human assistant surgeon without placing an extra control burden on the operating surgeon. Unlike previous interaction methods, the proposed method generates the viewpoint of a laparoscope through the reference to the surgical knowledge including the type of surgery and the surgical procedure. As a first application of this method, we focus a cholecystectomy, which is one of the simplest and most common surgeries. Based on the results of the task analysis, we find that a steering method is highly related to surgical procedures. In order to implement this method, we identify the surgical tool from a laparoscopic image, because the surgical procedure can be estimated by the types of surgical tools. The proposed interaction method changes automatically the steering mode that corresponds to the surgical procedure. In addition, in order to provide the surgeon with the capacity to adjust the laparoscopic view, we combined the surgeon´s voice commands to the proposed interaction.