Force Feedback Plays a Significant Role in Minimally Invasive Surgery

TLDR

Loss of haptic feedback in MIS disadvantages surgeons who rely on palpation to assess tissue, and conventional laparoscopic tools lack force feedback even with robotic systems. The study evaluates the role of force feedback in MIS by developing an automated laparoscopic grasper that provides haptic cues to help surgeons differentiate tissue stiffness. The authors tested the grasper on 20 human subjects, including surgeons and nonsurgeons, to assess force feedback’s role in tissue characterization. The experiments confirmed that combining vision and force feedback improves tissue characterization over vision or force alone, validating one hypothesis and demonstrating the grasper’s ability to differentiate tissue stiffness.

Abstract

To evaluate the role of force feedback with applications to minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Two research hypotheses were tested using our automated laparoscopic grasper.Conventional laparoscopic tools do not have the ability of providing force feedback to a surgeon when in use with or without robotic surgical systems. Loss of haptic (force and tactile) feedback in MIS procedures is a disadvantage to surgeons since they are conventionally used to palpating tissues to diagnose tissues as normal or abnormal. Therefore, the need exists to incorporate force feedback into laparoscopic tools.We have developed an automated laparoscopic grasper with force feedback capability to help surgeons differentiate tissue stiffness through a haptic interface device. We tested our system with 20 human subjects (10 surgeons and 10 nonsurgeons) using our grasper to evaluate the role of force feedback to characterize tissues and answer 2 research hypotheses.Our experiments confirmed 1 of our 2 research hypotheses, namely, providing both vision and force feedback leads to better tissue characterization than only vision feedback or only force feedback.We have validated 1 of our 2 research hypotheses regarding incorporating force feedback with vision feedback to characterize tissues of varying stiffness.