A Comparative Study for Touchless Telerobotic Surgery

This chapter presents a comparative study among different interfaces used to teleoperate a robot to complete surgical tasks. The objective of this study is to assess the feasibility on touchless surgery and its drawbacks compared to its counterpart, touch based surgery. The five interfaces evaluated include both touch-based and touchless gaming technologies, such as Kinect, Hydra, Leap Motion, Omega 7 and a standard keyboard. The main motivation for selecting touchless controlling devices is based on direct use of the hands to perform surgical tasks without compromising the sterility required in operating rooms (OR); the trade-off when working with touchless interfaces is the loss of direct force-feedback. However, based on the paradigm of sensory substitution, feedback is provided in the form of sound and visual cues. The experiments conducted to evaluate the different interaction modalities involve two surgical tasks, namely incision and peg transfer. Both tasks were conducted using a teleoperated high dexterous robot. Experiment results revealed that in the incision task, touchless interfaces provide higher sense of control compared with their touch-based counterparts with statistical significance (p <  0.01). While maintaining a fixed depth during incision, Kinect and keyboard showed the least variance due to the discrete control protocol used. In the peg transfer experiment, the Omega controller led to shorter task completion times, while the fastest learning rate was found when using the Leap motion sensor.