This paper introduces a new method for remote surgical cutting by providing haptic guidance along a trajectory that is measured in-situ through a miniature, tool-tip mounted endoscopic camera. By directly augmenting the instrument with a camera, instead of relying on an additional conventional endoscope, the approach becomes independent from inherent calibration uncertainties of the telemanipulation system, other than the micro camera itself, and from registration of pre- and intra-operative surgical data. We calculate a smooth cut path with corresponding scalpel orientation to guide the user towards the optimal trajectory. Experiments are conducted with passive and active haptic virtual fixtures. During active fixturing the optimal forward velocity is calculated to follow the path. The results indicate an improvement in terms of position accuracy, blade orientation, and forward velocity.

Registration of 3D facial surfaces means establishing point-to-point correspondence between two 3D facial surfaces. Difficulties typical for the registration of 3D facial surfaces are varying illumination, pose or viewpoint changes, varying facial expressions, and different appearance of individuals. In this work we propose to use a covariance matrix as descriptor for the neighborhood of a salient point in a face. It encodes the variance of the channels, such as red, green, blue, depth, etc., their correlations with each other, and spatial layout, while filtering out the influence of the disturbing effects mentioned above. A pyramidal approach is applied where first the location of a corresponding point is computed roughly and then the position is gradually refined. The method does not require any training. Particle Swarm Optimization makes the search for corresponding points more efficient. Results with a challenging dataset confirm that the approach works greatly for a variety of disturbing effects.

Despite the fact that minimally invasive robotic surgery provides many advantages for patients, such as reduced tissue trauma and shorter hospitalization, complex tasks (e.g. tissue piercing or knot-tying) are still time-consuming, error-prone and lead to quicker fatigue of the surgeon. Automating these recurrent tasks could greatly reduce total surgery time for patients and disburden the surgeon while he can focus on higher level challenges. This work tackles the problem of autonomous tissue piercing in robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery with a circular needle and general purpose surgical instruments. To command the instruments to an incision point, the surgeon utilizes a laser pointer to indicate the stitching area. A precise positioning of the needle is obtained by means of a switching visual servoing approach and the subsequent stitch is performed in a circular motion.

The use of technology for automation of surgical tasks has great potential in the field of robotic surgery. Automation of surgical robots essentially involves designing a control scheme for precise and automatic positioning of robotic manipulators. This objective can be achieved by the use of Visual servoing. We have developed a visual-servoing-based robotic laparoscopic surgery system. The visual servoing system enables autonomous control of a robot arm in a surgical set-up. In this paper, we propose algorithms for the automatic positioning of the laparoscope and the surgical instruments under small incisions of skin. We have verified the performance of the system theoretically and experimentally.

Telesurgery systems integrate multimodal communication and robotic technologies to enable surgical procedures to be performed from remote locations. They allow human surgeons to intuitively control laparoscopic instruments and to navigate within the human body. In this paper, we present selected topics on multimodal interaction in the context of telesurgery applications. These are results from the collaborative research project SFB 453 on ldquoHigh-Fidelity Telepresence and Teleactionrdquo which is funded by the German Research Foundation in the larger Munich area. The focus in this paper is on multimodal information processing and communication including simulation of surgical targets in the human body. Furthermore, we present an overview of our advanced multimodal telesurgery demonstrators that provide a comprehensive platform for our collaborative telepresence research.