HongliangRen：Surgical robotics and scene understanding towards augmented minimally invasive procedures
Reporter：HongliangRen
Abstract：Minimally Invasive Surgeries emerging in modern medical treatment have brought new opportunities and challenges for procedure-specific surgical motion generation and the associated motion understanding, which are the foundation of intelligent robotic manipulation and guiding interventions. Image-guided robotic surgery is expected to increase the precision, flexibility, and repeatability of surgical procedures but poses challenges for medical training. This talk will highlight some recent developments in dexterous robotic motion generation with motion understanding towards image-guided minimally invasive procedures. The procedure-specific telerobotic surgical systems can assist surgeons in performing dexterous manipulations using the master-slave console bilateral motion generation & mapping mechanism with variable stiffness. Meanwhile, surgical motion understanding aims to learn from the multi-domain surgical perceptions and describe the semantic relationship between instruments and surgical region of interest. Automatically understanding the instrument motions in robotic surgery is crucial to enhance surgical outcomes, enable surgical camera automation, and facilitate surgical training. To that end, we generate the task-aware saliency maps and scanpath of the instruments beyond tracking and segmentation, similar to the surgeon’s visual perception, to get the priority focus on selected surgical instruments. Furthermore, generating a surgical report in robot-assisted surgery, together with surgical scene understanding, can play a significant role in document entry tasks, surgical training, and post-operative analysis.
