Using Intermittent Synchronization to Compensate for Rhythmic Body Motion During Autonomous Surgical Cutting and Debridement

TL;DR

This paper introduces an intermittent synchronization method to improve autonomous surgical cutting and debridement accuracy amidst rhythmic body motions, demonstrating enhanced robustness and success rates over baseline approaches.

Contribution

The study presents a novel intermittent synchronization technique inspired by expert surgeons to compensate for rhythmic organ motion during autonomous surgery.

Findings

Intermittent synchronization is 1.8x slower than tracking but more robust to noise.

It reduces maximum cutting error by 2.6x.

Achieves 80% success rate in debridement, outperforming baseline.

Abstract

Anatomical structures are rarely static during a surgical procedure due to breathing, heartbeats, and peristaltic movements. Inspired by observing an expert surgeon, we propose an intermittent synchronization with the extrema of the rhythmic motion (i.e., the lowest velocity windows). We performed 2 experiments: (1) pattern cutting, and (2) debridement. In (1), we found that the intermittent synchronization approach, while 1.8x slower than tracking motion, was significantly more robust to noise and control latency, and it reduced the max cutting error by 2.6x In (2), a baseline approach with no synchronization achieves 62% success rate for each removal, while intermittent synchronization achieves 80%.