Vitreoretinal Surgical Robotic System with Autonomous Orbital Manipulation using Vector-Field Inequalities

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous orbital manipulation system for robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery, enhancing viewable areas of the eye fundus through simulation and physical experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel autonomous orbital manipulation method using vector-field inequalities, improving manipulability and view coverage in vitreoretinal robotic surgery.

Findings

Increased manipulability with orbital control in simulation.

Feasibility demonstrated on physical robot with improved view of the fundus.

Abstract

Vitreoretinal surgery pertains to the treatment of delicate tissues on the fundus of the eye using thin instruments. Surgeons frequently rotate the eye during surgery, which is called orbital manipulation, to observe regions around the fundus without moving the patient. In this paper, we propose the autonomous orbital manipulation of the eye in robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery with our tele-operated surgical system. In a simulation study, we preliminarily investigated the increase in the manipulability of our system using orbital manipulation. Furthermore, we demonstrated the feasibility of our method in experiments with a physical robot and a realistic eye model, showing an increase in the view-able area of the fundus when compared to a conventional technique. Source code and minimal example available at https://github.com/mmmarinho/icra2023_orbitalmanipulation.