Systematic review on visual aid technologies for surgical assistant robotic devices

This review comprehensively analyzes the modern literature on including visual aids in diverse surgical assistant robotic systems. The review considered a deep analysis of diverse technical and scientific sources that provide precise information on how the more recent surgical systems, especially those considering robotic devices, perform automatic operations on patients. The search procedure and the corresponding analytics considered only those conditions where vision systems played a significant role in the surgical procedure, despite the type of end-effector and if only position or force were used as part of the feedback analysis. This review is organized considering the robot configuration, the type of end-effector, the vision systems considered for those cases, and the associated control actions, which must include the acquired image or video. The study analyzes the key contributions of the published cases. It provides a critical description of the advantages and shortcomings of the technological implementation of vision systems in surgical robotic devices. Finally, this review provides a general prospective view of ongoing research on vision aids for surgical robotic systems, which will become an ordinary actor in future surgical systems.