IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering

Retinal vein cannulation is a technically demanding surgical procedure and its feasibility relies on using advanced surgical robots equipped with force-sensing microneedles, and reliable detection of the moment of venous puncture. This paper reports the first in-vivo retinal vein cannulation trial on rabbit eyes, using sensorized metal needles, and investigates puncture detection. We utilized total of four indices including two previously demonstrated and two new ones and improved the detection rate from 75% to 92%. The study provides promising results and the criteria developed may serve as guidelines for further investigation into puncture detection in in-vivo retinal vein cannulation... Read more

This work aims to evaluate two variants of an adaptive force control scheme to mitigate the risk of unsafe scleral forces during robot-assisted eye surgery procedures. The robot and its dependencies were set up in an operating room, where we enrolled ten retina fellows and ophthalmology residents into a simulated procedure. The participants were asked to follow phantom retinal vessels using a custom force-sensing instrument, with and without robotic assistance. We demonstrate that the control methods can make the robot autonomously maintain the scleral forces at predetermined safe levels better than freehand manipulations, while the surgeon performs the surgical tasks... Read more

Functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) is a common minimally invasive technique but remains manually operated by the surgeon with one hand holding the endoscope most of the time. This article reports a novel robotic system for side-by-side assistance of endoscope positioning with the surgeon in FESS from platform development to clinical validation. The design emphasizes clinical considerations for both operational safety and user ergonomics, which were validated by clinical trials to demonstrate good surgical applicability in terms of efficient robot set-up and enabling three-handed procedures performed by the surgeon alone, without disrupting the routine practice of FESS... Read more