Securing Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery through Perception Complementarities

Laparoscopic surgery presents practical benefits over traditional open surgery, including reduced risk of infection, discomfort and recovery time for patients. Introducing robot systems into surgical tasks provides additional enhancements, including improved precision, remote operation, and an intelligent software layer capable of filtering aberrant motion and scaling surgical maneuvers. However, the software interface in telesurgery also lends itself to potential adversarial cyber attacks. Such attacks can negatively effect both surgeon motion commands and sensory information relayed to the operator. To combat cyber attacks on the latter, one method to enhance surgeon feedback through multiple sensory pathways is to incorporate reliable, complementary forms of information across different sensory modes. Built-in partial redundancies or inferences between perceptual channels, or perception complementarities, can be used both to detect and recover from compromised operator feedback. In surgery, haptic sensations are extremely useful for surgeons to prevent undue and unwanted tissue damage from excessive tool-tissue force. Direct force sensing is not yet deployable due to sterilization requirements of the operating room. Instead, combinations of other sensing methods may be relied upon, such as noncontact model-based force estimation. This paper presents the design of a surgical simulator software that can be used for vision-based non-contact force sensing to inform the perception complementarity of vision and force feedback for telesurgery. A brief user study is conducted to verify the efficacy of graphical force feedback from vision-based force estimation, and suggests that vision may effectively complement direct force sensing.