On the feasibility of heart motion compensation on the daVinci® surgical robot for coronary artery bypass surgery: Implementation and user studies

This paper describes the implementation of a heart motion compensation system on the da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical Inc.) for coronary artery bypass surgery. By introducing a robot-assisted solution, this surgery could be performed completely minimally invasively and on a beating heart. In this work we describe the development of open loop controllers based on spectral line decomposition and the assumption of a periodic trajectory. This allows the da Vinci patient-side manipulators to track an actual heart trajectory with sub-millimetre error. Further, to simulate a virtually stabilized environment, we present the novel concept of maintaining the camera fixed relative to the heart target, effectively decoupling the vision tracking and arm tracking challenges. Finally, we executed preliminary experiments to evaluate surgeons´ ability to perform simulated suturing and peg transfer tasks on a moving target. Performance for the simulated suturing was evaluated based on task completion time, accuracy of needle placement, and number of errors. For the suture task, the number of missed targets decreased from 37% to 13% when compensation was enabled, the number of hit targets increased from 26% to 41%, and completion time decreased. For the peg transfer tasks, again completion time and number of errors were measured. Though the margin for error was larger, there was less perceived difficulty of the task when compensation was enabled.