Stiffness perception during pinching and dissection with teleoperated haptic forceps

摘要

Robotic-assisted surgery requires an intuitive and effective human-machine interface. Providing haptic feedback for pinching and dissecting motions of bipolar forceps, a tool commonly used in neurosurgery, could potentially improve the surgeon's experience. Current haptic hand controllers have limited actuation and feedback capability, requiring surgeons to hold the handle differently compared to a conventional tool. This paper presents a new master design that provides 1-DOF force feedback by adding a Hall-effect sensor and a voice coil actuator directly onto a bipolar forceps. Twenty participants used this interface to perform a remote stiffness perception test that employed the method of constant stimuli. Ten participants pinched the samples, and the other ten dissected them. Each participant did two blocks of 35 trials with only visual feedback or with visual and haptic feedback in random order. Psychometric functions were created from the results to compare perceptual capabilities, metrics were calculated from the force and position data, and participant survey responses were analyzed. The results show that providing the force feedback made the task seem easier, increased the participant's confidence, and reduced the total tip distance traveled in the pinching task. The haptic feedback slightly improved stiffness perception in the pinching task but did not improve perception in the dissection task. These results support the utility of a force-feedback attachment to conventional forceps for pinching and motivate further investigation into the design for dissection.