Smart devices in robot-assisted laser microsurgery: Towards ubiquitous tele-cooperation

This paper presents a novel control interface for robot-assisted laser microsurgery using a smart device. This work expands the capabilities and benefits of the virtual scalpel concept, developed in a previous work. The use of a smart device also gives the system a high degree of versatility and flexibility, since the system can be controlled remotely from any place that has an Internet connection. This new control can be used in combination with a local user interface for tele-cooperation. Local and remote surgeons can cooperate at different levels and in different roles, such as “local expert surgeon — remote resident” and “local resident — remote expert surgeon”. In this paper, the performance of the new interface is analysed and compared with other interfaces: graphics pen on a tablet PC and the traditional manual micromanipulator. For that, synthetic tests were carried out by 10 subjects. The results show slightly degraded precision performance when using the remote interface in comparison with the graphics pen, but the users perform the tasks faster. Possible reasons for this observation are discussed in the paper and include, for example, differences in display size and screen visualization angle. With respect to the traditional manual micromanipulator, the new remote control has an equivalent precision but the absolute maximum error is much lower, demonstrating safer procedures and the transfer of the virtual scalpel benefits from the local to the remote interface.