Accurate instrument pose estimation is a crucial step towards the future of robotic surgery, enabling applications such as autonomous surgical task execution. Vision-based methods for surgical instrument pose estimation provide a practical approach to tool tracking, but they often require markers to be attached to the instruments. Recently, more research has focused on the development of markerless methods based on deep learning. However, acquiring realistic surgical data, with ground truth (GT) instrument poses, required for deep learning training, is challenging. To address the issues in surgical instrument pose estimation, we introduce the Surgical Robot Instrument Pose Estimation (SurgRIPE) challenge, hosted at the 26th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2023. The objectives of this challenge are: (1) to provide the surgical vision community with realistic surgical video data paired with ground truth instrument poses, and (2) to establish a benchmark for evaluating markerless pose estimation methods. The challenge led to the development of several novel algorithms that showcased improved accuracy and robustness over existing methods. The performance evaluation study on the SurgRIPE dataset highlights the potential of these advanced algorithms to be integrated into robotic surgery systems, paving the way for more precise and autonomous surgical procedures. The SurgRIPE challenge has successfully established a new benchmark for the field, encouraging further research and development in surgical robot instrument pose estimation.

In Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS), the estimation of the pose of surgical tools is crucial for applications such as surgical navigation, visual servoing, autonomous robotic task execution and augmented reality. A plethora of hardware-based and vision-based methods have been proposed in the literature. However, direct application of these methods to RMIS has significant limitations due to partial tool visibility, occlusions and changes in the surgical scene. In this work, a novel keypoint-graph-based network is proposed to estimate the pose of texture-less cylindrical surgical tools of small diameter. To deal with the challenges in RMIS, keypoint object representation is used and for the first time, temporal information is combined with spatial information in keypoint graph representation, for keypoint refinement. Finally, stable and accurate tool pose is computed using a PnP solver. Our performance evaluation study has shown that the proposed method is able to accurately predict the pose of a textureless robotic shaft with an ADD-S score of over 98%. The method outperforms state-of-the-art pose estimation models under challenging conditions such as object occlusion and changes in the lighting of the scene.

The ability to track surgical instruments in realtime is crucial for autonomous Robotic Assisted Surgery (RAS). Recently, the fusion of visual and kinematic data has been proposed to track surgical instruments. However, these methods assume that both sensors are equally reliable, and cannot successfully handle cases where there are significant perturbations in one of the sensors' data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing an enhanced fusion-based method. The main advantage of our method is that it can adjust fusion weights to adapt to sensor perturbations and failures. Another problem is that before performing an autonomous task, these robots have to be repetitively recalibrated by a human for each new patient to estimate the transformations between the different robotic arms. To address this problem, we propose a self-calibration algorithm that empowers the robot to autonomously calibrate the transformations by itself in the beginning of the surgery. We applied our fusion and selfcalibration algorithms for autonomous ultrasound tissue scanning and we showed that the robot achieved stable ultrasound imaging when using our method. Our performance evaluation shows that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-art both in normal and challenging situations.

In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), tissue scanning with imaging probes is required for subsurface visualisation to characterise the state of the tissue. However, scanning of large tissue surfaces in the presence of motion is a challenging task for the surgeon. Recently, robot-assisted local tissue scanning has been investigated for motion stabilisation of imaging probes to facilitate the capturing of good quality images and reduce the surgeon's cognitive load. Nonetheless, these approaches require the tissue surface to be static or translating with periodic motion. To eliminate these assumptions, we propose a visual servoing framework for autonomous tissue scanning, able to deal with free-form tissue motion. The 3D structure of the surgical scene is recovered, and a feature-based method is proposed to estimate the motion of the tissue in real-time. The desired scanning trajectory is manually defined on a reference frame and continuously updated using projective geometry to follow the tissue motion and control the movement of the robotic arm. The advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require the learning of the tissue motion prior to scanning and can deal with free-form motion. We deployed this framework on the da Vinci®surgical robot using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) for Ultrasound tissue scanning. Our framework can be easily extended to other probe-based imaging modalities.

Despite the recent success of state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms in object recognition, when these are deployed as-is on a mobile service robot, we observed that they failed to recognize many objects in real human environments. In this paper, we introduce a learning algorithm in which robots address this flaw by asking humans for help, also known as a symbiotic autonomy approach. In particular, we bootstrap YOLOv2, a state-of-the-art deep neural network and train a new neural network, that we call HHELP, using only data collected from human help. Using an RGB camera and an onboard tablet, the robot proactively seeks human input to assist it in labeling surrounding objects. Pepper, located at CMU, and Monarch Mbot, located at ISR-Lisbon, were the service robots that we used to validate the proposed approach. We conducted a study in a realistic domestic environment over the course of 20 days with 6 research participants. To improve object detection, we used the two neural networks, YOLOv2 + HHELP, in parallel. Following this methodology, the robot was able to detect twice the number of objects compared to the initial YOLOv2 neural network, and achieved a higher mAP (mean Average Precision) score. Using the learning algorithm the robot also collected data about where an object was located and to whom it belonged to by asking humans. This enabled us to explore a future use case where robots can search for a specific person's object. We view the contribution of this work to be relevant for service robots in general, in addition to Pepper, and Mbot.