Enabling Technology for Safe Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery: Early Warning for Unsafe Scleral Force

Retinal microsurgery is technically demanding and requires high surgical skill with very little room for manipulation error. During surgery the tool needs to be inserted into the eyeball while maintaining constant contact with the sclera. Any unexpected manipulation could cause extreme tool-sclera contact force (scleral force) thus damage the sclera. The introduction of robotic assistance could enhance and expand the surgeon's manipulation capabilities during surgery. However, the potential intra-operative danger from surgeon's misoperations remains difficult to detect and prevent by existing robotic systems. Therefore, we propose a method to predict imminent unsafe manipulation in robot-assisted retinal surgery and generate feedback to the surgeon via auditory substitution. The surgeon could then react to the possible unsafe events in advance. This work specifically focuses on minimizing sclera damage using a force-sensing tool calibrated to measure small scleral forces. A recurrent neural network is designed and trained to predict the force safety status up to 500 milliseconds in the future. The system is implemented using an existing "steady hand" eye robot. A vessel following manipulation task is designed and performed on a dry eye phantom to emulate the retinal surgery and to analyze the proposed method. Finally, preliminary validation experiments are performed by five users, the results of which indicate that the proposed early warning system could help to reduce the number of unsafe manipulation events.