Design and analysis of a tactile sensor used in minimally invasive surgery

At the present, tactile sensor technology can be found many applications in many industrial and medical areas, and is still attracting more and more research attention. In this paper, a new tactile sensor, focusing on the characterization of different tissues, is designed. Tissue characterization plays an important role in minimally invasive surgery which lacks the force feedback. Consider a compatible configuration requirement, this sensor possesses a circular cross-section that makes it easily be integrated and miniaturized on a catheter tip. To measure the static contact information, the sensitive element in this sensor is made of semiconductive polymer composite. Comparing with other tactile sensors, this sensor possesses a gap between the sensitive element and the plastic plate, which allows the blood flowing so as to reduce the blood effect. To verify the functionality of this sensor, the interactions between the sensor and two different elastomers, as two surrogates for two kinds of tissue in different hardness, are analyzed in finite element analysis. In either case with or without blood effect, the results of finite element analysis show this sensor can distinguish the selected materials. However, the sensor´s output with blood effect is larger than that without blood effect.