An image-processing based prototype of decreasing transmission time of visual information for a tele-operative surgical system

The Internet-based tele-operative surgical training system for Vascular Interventional Surgery (VIS) is a promising method to protect surgeons from long time exposure to radiation and to do the surgery cooperatively across the whole world and to allow unskilled surgeons to learn basic catheter or guidewire skills corresponding to inter-country distances. However, unpredictable and variable transmission time of visual feedback is always accompanied by the significant deterioration of the feasibility and manoeuvrability and could lead to damage to tissues in actual surgery. In this paper, an image-processing based prototype was proposed to effectively reduce the transmission time of visual feedback. At patient's site, the shape of catheter or guidewire was detected in real time and the position of catheter was presented by the three dimensional coordinates in World Coordinate System (WCS). Furthermore, at operative site, the shape of catheter was reconstructed as the visual feedback according to the coordinate values received from patient's site. Transmission time of visual feedback was therefore decreased due to significant reduction of data volume. In addition, coordinates values are more easily synchronized with the control signals and haptic data due to the size between visual and other data is similar. Finally, a remote transmission experiment of visual feedback was conducted to show that the proposed prototype made a better performance improvement for Internet-based transmission with delays during inter-country distances.