Graphical representation of tactile sensing data in minimally invasive surgery

Nowadays, Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has gained enormous popularity among the surgeons and in teleoperation procedures such as Robotic Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery and Tele-Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgery. Despite its many advantages, MIS decreases the tactile sensory perception of the surgeon during grasping or manipulation of biological tissues. The loss of tactile perception has attracted a lot of attention. In this paper, we describe the detailed design of the hardware and software system used for graphical representation of the tactile sensing data. The proposed hardware and data acquisition system receives signals from the sensors incorporated on the MIS grasper and then transmits them to a personal computer. The developed software is also presented and its capabilities are discussed accordingly. Using this designed system, it is possible to determine the softness of the grasped objects. The degree of the softness is also displayed visually on the computer. The tactile sensor consists of four sensing elements which are integrated in each jaw of a modified commercial endoscopic grasper. Each sensing element consists of two piezoelectric polymer Plyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) films. The combination of the output voltages from each sensing element is used to determine the softness of the grasped object.