Innovative optical microsystem for static and dynamic tissue diagnosis in minimally invasive surgical operations

During conventional surgical tasks, surgeons use their tactile perception in their finger tips to sense the degree of softness of biological tissues to identify tissue types and to feel for any abnormalities. However, in robotic-assisted surgical systems, surgeons are unable to sense this information because only surgical tools interact with tissues. In order to provide surgeons with such useful tactile perception, therefore, a tactile sensor is required that is capable of simultaneously measuring contact force and resulting tissue deformation. Accordingly, this paper discusses the design, prototyping, testing, and validation of an innovative tactile sensor that is capable of measuring the degree of softness of soft objects such as tissues under both static and dynamic loading conditions and which is also magnetic resonance compatible and electrically passive. These unique characteristics of the proposed sensor would also make it a practical choice for use in robotic-assisted surgical platforms. The prototype version of this sensor was developed by using optical micro-systems technology and, thus far, experimental test results performed on the prototyped sensor have validated its ability to measure the relative softness of artificial tissues.