A novel design of a wearable device for measuring force and torque in vascular surgery

In-vivo measurement of force/torque signals between a surgical tool and human vessels during vascular surgery operations could provide a ground-truth data-set for constructing and evaluating haptics-enabled surgical simulation systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel wearable device for measuring such signals. This new design provides much higher measurement accuracy than a previous prototype. Experimental results by using standard weights provide that the relative force and torque error is about 5%. With time-varying load, the new device is compared with an ATI Nano17 force/torque sensor; average relative errors between the force signals is about 16.85%, and average relative errors between the torque signals is about 28.74%. Preliminary manipulation experiments of inserting a catheter into a vascular phantom model illustrated that the device can detect the collision between the catheter and the vascular walls. Subtle force/torque changes caused by changes of movement direction can be detected. Force/torque changes at some critical point (such as the interaction point of vessels) can also be detected.