dVRK-based teleoperation of a CTR robot with stereovision feedback for neurosurgery

Decades of efforts have been made to minimize the invasiveness of the procedures inside the patient’s brain. Endoscopic tools are first developed and applied in neurosurgery, which significantly reduce the trauma to a limited number of small holes but also limit the surgeon’s reachability to the target tissue inside of the brain due to the tool’s rigidity. Flexible robotic tools are then introduced to perform the procedures with a minimally invasive approach [1] by providing enhanced dexterity with their tentacle-like body. However, intuitive and efficient manipulation of the robotic tools remains challenging because currently the surgeon manipulates the robotic tools with feedback of the monocular vision from a standard clinical neuro-endoscope suffering from lack of depth perception. In this paper, we propose a robotic system with a flexible end-effector and stere- ovision feedback for neurosurgery by integrating our previously-developed Concentric Tube Robot (CTR)[2], the da Vinci Robot Research Kit (dVRK) [3] and a customized dual endoscope camera subsystem. The CTR manipulator was teleoperated with the dVRK master tool manipulator (MTM). A virtual motion boundary was applied for the MTM by haptic feedback based on the CTR’s workspace to guide the operator to control the CTR within its motion range. The manipulation performance of the proposed system was experimentally evaluated and the results of that showed under the stereovision feedback the manipulation accuracy of the CTR is 2.8 mm and the image transmission latency is 1.5 seconds. This preliminary study suggests that our proposed system has the potential of improving surgeons’ manipulation performance in robot-assisted minimally invasive neurosurgery.