Teleoperation in Surgical Robotics – Network Latency Effects on Surgical Performance

A teleoperated surgical robotic system allows surgical procedures to be conducted across long distances while utilizing wired and wireless communication with a wide spectrum of performance that may affect the outcome.

An open architecture portable surgical robotic system (Raven) was developed for both open and minimally invasive surgery. The system has been the subject of an intensive telesurgical experimental protocol aimed at exploring the boundaries of the system and surgeon performance during a series of field experiments in extreme environments (desert and underwater) teleportation between US, Europe, and Japan as well as lab experiments under synthetic fixed time delay. One standard task (block transfer emulating tissue manipulation) of the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) training kit was used for the experimental protocol. Network characterization indicated a typical time delay in the range of 16-172 ms in field experiments.

The results of the lab experiments showed that the completion time of the task as well as the length of the tool tip trajectory significantly increased (α < 0.02 ) as time delay increased in the range of 0-0.5 sec increased. For teleoperation with a time delay of 0.25s and 0.5s the task completion time was lengthened by a factor of 1.45 and 2.04 with respect to no time delay, whereas the length of the tools’ trajectory was increased by a factor of 1.28 and 1.53 with respect to no time delay. There were no statistical differences between experienced surgeons and non-surgeons in the number of errors (block drooping) as well as the completion time and the tool tip path length at
different time delays.

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Device

Raven 1

| Status: Completed |

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PUblications

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[ CP32] G. Sankaranarayanan, B. Hannaford, H. King, S.Y. Ko, M. Lum, D. Friedman, J. Rosen, and B. Hannaford, Portable Surgery Master Station for Mobile Robotic Surgery, Proceedings of the ROBOCOMM, the first International, conference on Robot Communication and Coordination, Athens, Greece, Oct 2007

[ CP33] M. J.H. Lum, D. C. W. Friedman, G. Sankaranarayanan, H. King, A. Wright, M. Sinanan, T. Lendvay, J. Rosen, B. Hannaford, Objective Assessment of Telesurgical Robot Systems: Telerobotic FLS, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR 16) pp. 263-265, Long Beach CA, Jan. 29 - Feb. 1, 2008

[ CP37] Mitchell J.H. Lum, Jacob Rosen, Hawkeye King, Diana C.W. Friedman, Thomas Lendvay, Andrew S. Wright, Mika N. Sinanan, and Blake Hannaford, Teleopeartion in Surgical Robotics – Network Latency Effects on Surgical Performance, 31th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society EMBS, Minneapolis MN, Sept. 2009.

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