Article intro: A DVRK-based Framework for Surgical Subtask Automation

 

Acta Polytechnica Hungarica recently introduced its special issue on medical robotics platforms, featuring an article on surgical skill assessment:

A DVRK-based Framework for Surgical Subtask Automation

by Tamás  D. Nagy and Tamás Haidegger 

Abstract

Robotic assistance is becoming a standard in Minimally Invasive Surgery.Despite its clinical benefits and technical potential, surgeons still have to perform manu-ally a number of monotonous and time-consuming surgical subtasks, like knot-tying orblunt dissection. Many believe that the next bold step in the advancement of roboticsurgery is the automation of such subtasks. Partial automation can reduce the cogni-tive load on surgeons, and support them in paying more attention to the critical elementsof the surgical workflow. Our aim was to develop a software framework to ease andhasten the automation of surgical subtasks. This framework was built alongside the DaVinci Research Kit (DVRK), while it can be ported onto other robotic platforms, sinceit is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). The software includes both stereovision-based and hierarchical motion planning, with a wide palette of often used surgi-cal gestures—such as grasping, cutting or soft tissue manipulation—as building blocks tosupport the high-level implementation of autonomous surgical subtask execution routines.This open-source surgical automation framework—namedirob-saf—is available athttps://github.com/ABC-iRobotics/irob-saf.

Source: APH