Haptic feedback restoration in surgical teleoperated robotic platforms

The lack of haptic feedback is considered a critical drawback in current surgical teleoperated platforms, leading to a higher amount of applied forces on tissues. Consequently, the risk of intraoperatively damaging healthy organs increases. Yet, the recent trend for surgeons is to reconstruct the missing kinesthetic/tactile information through a visual compensation. Moreover, the discussion on haptics is significantly biased by da Vinci system market supremacy. This robotic platform doesn’t provide the surgeon with haptic feedback, but enhanced 3D vision is available at the master site. The arising debate requires clinically-relevant test-cases, designed in a close collaboration between engineers and medical doctors, to be effectively solved. The aim of this thesis was, in the first instance, to restore haptic feedback in representative surgical teleoperated platforms, facing all the related technical challenges. Secondly, the potential benefits of haptics were evaluated under both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view through user studies, carried out with robotic surgeons. Results indicate that haptic restoration is beneficial in specific test-cases, such as intraoperative palpation and surgical incision, and for quantitative metrics concerning precision, accuracy and applied forces. Qualitatively, the users preferred to perform tasks with haptic feedback available at the master side, rather than having just visual feedback. The relatively extensive collected results may be used by the scientific community to better negotiate, if not definitively sedate, the haptic controversy.