Graphical Rendering of Localized Lumps for MIS Applications

Minimally invasive sugery (MIS) has increasingly been used in different surgical routines despite having significant shortcomings such as a lack of tactile feedback. Restoring this missing tactile information, particularly the information gained through tissue palpation, would be a significant enhancement to MIS capabilities. Tissue palpation is particularly important and commonly used in locating embedded lumps. The present study is inspired by this major limitation of the MIS procedure and is aimed at developing a system to reconstruct the lost palpation capability of surgeons in an effective way. By collecting necessary information on the size and location of hidden features using MIS graspers equipped with tactile sensors, the information can be processed and graphically rendered to the surgeon. Therefore, using the proposed system, surgeons can identify the presence or absence, location, and approximate size of hidden lumps simply by grasping the target organ with a smart endoscopic grasper. The results of the conducted experiments on the prototyped MIS graspers represented by graphical images are compared with those of the finite element models.