Force Feedback Plays a Significant Role in Minimally Invasive Surgery: Results and Analysis

Abstract

In Brief Objective: To evaluate the role of force feedback with applications to minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Two research hypotheses were tested using our automated laparoscopic grasper. Summary Background Data: Conventional laparoscopic tools do not have the ability of providing force feedback to a surgeon when in use with or without robotic surgical systems. Loss of haptic (force and tactile) feedback in MIS procedures is a disadvantage to surgeons since they are conventionally used to palpating tissues to diagnose tissues as normal or abnormal. Therefore, the need exists to incorporate force feedback into laparoscopic tools. Methods: We have developed an automated laparoscopic grasper with force feedback capability to help surgeons differentiate tissue stiffness through a haptic interface device. We tested our system with 20 human subjects (10 surgeons and 10 nonsurgeons) using our grasper to evaluate the role of force feedback to characterize tissues and answer 2 research hypotheses. Results: Our experiments confirmed 1 of our 2 research hypotheses, namely, providing both vision and force feedback leads to better tissue characterization than only vision feedback or only force feedback. Conclusions: We have validated 1 of our 2 research hypotheses regarding incorporating force feedback with vision feedback to characterize tissues of varying stiffness. This paper focuses on evaluating the role of force feedback in minimally invasive surgery using an automated laparoscopic grasper developed in our laboratory. Several experiments with human subjects were performed to characterize various tissue samples using only vision feedback, only force feedback, both vision and force feedback, and direct exploration.