Bimanual teleoperation with heart motion compensation on the da Vinci® Research Kit: Implementation and preliminary experiments

This paper describes the implementation of a heart motion compensation system on the da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical Inc.) with the da Vinci Research Kit, for the purpose of simulating minimally invasive coronary artery bypass surgery on the beating heart. A Novint Falcon device is used to simulate the motion of the coronary bypass site. The 3D position of the heart simulator is measured optically in real time using an NDI Optotrak Certus tracker. The NDI measurements are used to command the da Vinci patient side manipulators to track, from a fixed distance, the simulated heart surface. Visual stabilization is achieved by having a stereo endoscopic camera carried by another patient-side manipulator that is also tracking the heart surface. The system performance is evaluated and discussed. In a preliminary evaluation study, surgeons were asked to perform a bimanual teleoperation suturing task on the simulated heart, with the gold standard being a suturing task on a stationary surface. When motion compensation was enabled, the median completion time dropped from 1.24 to 1.07 of the gold standard, the number of errors was reduced, and subjective measures show higher preference for the use of motion compensation in the da Vinci controllers.