Exploring the Needle Tip Interaction Force with Retinal Tissue Deformation in Vitreoretinal Surgery

Recent advancements in age-related macular degeneration treatments necessitate precision delivery into the subretinal space, emphasizing minimally invasive procedures targeting the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)-Bruch's membrane complex without causing trauma. Even for skilled surgeons, the inherent hand tremors during manual surgery can jeopardize the safety of these critical interventions. This has fostered the evolution of robotic systems designed to prevent such tremors. These robots are enhanced by FBG sensors, which sense the small force interactions between the surgical instruments and retinal tissue. To enable the community to design algorithms taking advantage of such force feedback data, this paper focuses on the need to provide a specialized dataset, integrating optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging together with the aforementioned force data. We introduce a unique dataset, integrating force sensing data synchronized with OCT B-scan images, derived from a sophisticated setup involving robotic assistance and OCT integrated microscopes. Furthermore, we present a neural network model for image-based force estimation to demonstrate the dataset's applicability.