An Isomorphic Interactive Device for the Interventional Surgical Robot after In Vivo Study

Interventional surgical robots are widely used in neurosurgery to improve surgeons’ working environment and surgical safety. Based on the actual operational needs of surgeons’ feedback during preliminary in vivo experiments, this paper proposed an isomorphic interactive master controller for the master–slave interventional surgical robot. The isomorphic design of the controller allows surgeons to utilize their surgical skills during remote interventional surgeries. The controller uses the catheter and guidewire as the operating handle, the same as during actual surgeries. The collaborative operational structure design and the working methods followed the clinical operational skills. The linear force feedback and torque feedback devices were designed to improve the safety of surgeries under remote operating conditions. An eccentric force compensation was conducted to achieve accurate force feedback. Several experiments were carried out, such as calibration experiments, master–slave control performance evaluation experiments, and operation comparison experiments on the novel and previously used controllers. The experimental results show that the proposed controller can perform complex operations in remote surgery applications and has the potential for further animal experiment evaluations.

An Intravascular Catheter Bending Recognition Method for Interventional Surgical Robots

Robot-assisted interventional surgery can greatly reduce the radiation received by surgeons during the operation, but the lack of force detection and force feedback is still a risk in the operation which may harm the patient. In those robotic surgeries, the traditional force detection methods may have measurement losses and errors caused by mechanical transmission and cannot identify the direction of the force. In this paper, an interventional surgery robot system with a force detection device is designed and a new force detection method based on strain gauges is proposed to detect the force and infer the bending direction of the catheter in the vessel by using BP neural network. In addition, genetic algorithm is used to optimize the BP neural network, and the error between the calculated results and the actual results is reduced by 37%, which improves the accuracy of catheter bending recognition. Combining this new method with traditional force sensors not only reduces the error caused by the traditional mechanical transmission, but also can detect the bending direction of the catheter in the blood vessel, which greatly improves the safety of the operation.

Remote Vascular Interventional Surgery Robotics: A Literature Review

Interventional doctors are exposed to radiation hazards during the operation and endure high work intensity. Remote vascular interventional surgery robotics is a hot research field that can not only protect the health of interventional doctors, but also improve accuracy and efficiency of surgeries. However, the current vascular interventional robots still have many shortcomings to be improved. This article introduces the mechanical structure characteristics of various fields of vascular interventional therapy surgical robots, discusses the current key features of vascular interventional surgical robotics in force sensing, haptic feedback, and control methods, summarizes current frontiers about autonomous surgery, long geographic distances remote surgery and MRI-compatible structures. Finally, combined with the current research status of vascular interventional surgery robots, this article analyzes the development directions and puts forward a vision for the future vascular interventional surgery robots.

Artificial Intelligence-a Paradigm shift in Health Care Management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually changing the practice of surgery with the advanced technological development of imaging, navigation, and robotic intervention. In this article, the recent successful and influential applications of AI in surgery are reviewed from pre-operative planning and intra-operative guidance to the integration of surgical robots. It ends with summarizing the current state, emerging trends, and major challenges in the future development of AI in surgery. Robotic surgery is the use of computer technologies working in conjunction with robot systems to perform medical procedures. The technology is also known as computer-aided surgery and robot-assisted surgery. This paper reviews the key capabilities of AI to help surgeons understand and critically evaluate new AI applications and to contribute to new developments in the field of Neuro Surgery.

Teleoperated Surgical Robot Security

Technology has greatly increased the availability of medical procedures in remote locations that are difficult to access, such as battlefields. Teleoperated surgical robots can be used to perform surgeries on patients over the internet in remote locations. A surgeon can remotely operate the robot to perform a procedure in another room or in a different continent. However, security technology has not yet caught up to these cyber-physical devices. There exist potential cybersecurity attacks on these medical devices that could expose a patient to danger in contrast to traditional surgery. Hence, the security of the system is very important. A malicious actor can gain control of the device and potentially threaten the life of a patient. In this chapter, the authors conduct a survey of potential attack vectors a malicious actor could exploit to deny service to the device, gain control of the device, and steal patient data. Furthermore, after the vulnerability analysis, the authors provide mitigation techniques to limit the risk of these attack vectors.

Remote Vascular Interventional Surgery Robotics: A Review

Interventional doctors are exposed to radiation hazards during the operation and endure high work intensity. Remote vascular interventional surgery robotics is a hot research field that can not only protect the health of interventional doctors, but also improve accuracy and efficiency of surgeries. However, the current vascular interventional robots still have many shortcomings to be improved. This article introduces the mechanical structure characteristics of various fields of vascular interventional therapy surgical robots, discusses the current key features of vascular interventional surgical robotics in force sensing, haptic feedback, and control methods, summarizes current frontiers about autonomous surgery, long geographic distances remote surgery and MRI-compatible structures. Finally, combined with the current research status of vascular interventional surgery robots, this article analyzes the development directions and puts forward a vision for the future vascular interventional surgery robots.

AI in Healthcare: medical and socio-economic benefits and challenges

The objective of this research was to investigate benefits and challenges of AI in healthcare. Wedivided the benefits into two subcategories: benefits related to the medical domain, and the benefitsrelated to economic and social lives domain. The findings are: 1) Smart data inclusion contributessignificantly and help to improve decision-making quality. 2) Surgical robots have improved theprecision and predictability of the surgery. 3) Intraoperative guidance via video pictures andcommunication systems has proven to be beneficial, particularly in situations when there is a pooraccess to clinics, travel limitations, or pandemic. 4) Sentiment analysis analyzes, interprets, andresponds to verbal expressions of human emotions. 6)Data scientists have been able to create algorithmsthat can comprehend human feeling from written textwith unique combination of NLP and sentimentanalysis. 7) AI could re-balance a clinician's workload,providing them more time to connect with patientsand thereby improve care quality. The majorchallenges are: 1) the data reflects sometimesinherent biases and disparities in the healthcare system. 2) The demand for huge datasets incentivizesdevelopers to acquire data from a large number of patients. Some patients may be worried that thisdata collection would infringe on their confidentiality. 3) AI systems may occasionally be incorrect,resulting in patient damage or other health-care issues. It is not assumed that a new technology willalways be good; it has the potential to be detrimental. There are some improvements that benefit andthere are some challenges that may harm, and these challenges must be responded by futureresearch.