Towards safer robot-assisted surgery: A markerless augmented reality framework

Robot-assisted surgery is rapidly developing in the medical field, and the integration of augmented reality shows the potential to improve the operation performance of surgeons by providing more visual information. In this paper, we proposed a markerless augmented reality framework to enhance safety by avoiding intra-operative bleeding, which is a high risk caused by collision between surgical instruments and delicate blood vessels (arteries or veins). Advanced stereo reconstruction and segmentation networks are compared to find the best combination to reconstruct the intra-operative blood vessel in 3D space for registration with the pre-operative model, and the minimum distance detection between the instruments and the blood vessel is implemented. A robot-assisted lymphadenectomy is emulated on the da Vinci Research Kit in a dry lab, and ten human subjects perform this operation to explore the usability of the proposed framework. The result shows that the augmented reality framework can help the users to avoid the dangerous collision between the instruments and the delicate blood vessel while not introducing an extra load. It provides a flexible framework that integrates augmented reality into the medical robotic platform to enhance safety during surgery.