Theses Master's

Assistive Visual Tools For Surgery

Reiter, Austin

This thesis describes efforts towards the development of computational vision tools to assist physicians during surgical procedures. Surgical robotics has come a long way towards improving patient care and enhancing the abilities of the surgeon. It was originally introduced to address the limitations of manual laparoscopy, whereby long rigid tools are being used to perform complicated surgical procedures. However, as we continue to reduce the invasiveness of this hardware and the tools becomes more complicated (e.g., flexible, articulated), intelligent algorithms are necessary to assist the surgeon in both controlling the surgical robot and making it smarter. Tool tracking algorithms are investigated to extract the locations of the surgical tools in both 2-dimensions (for visual servoing of a motorized camera system) and 3-dimensions (for situational awareness, increased patient safety, and virtual measuring capabilities). This work is shown in real surgical scenarios, such as manual human laparoscopies as well as robotic procedures using Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci robot. Additionally, newer procedural paradigms which reduce the invasiveness of surgical access (e.g., Single-Port Access (SPA), Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES)) require more flexible and dexterous hardware. Vision is used to measure the state of continuum ("snake") robots in order to provide feedback to control systems and be able to perform fully-automated, closed-loop actions (e.g., suturing, biopsies, etc). This work is performed on the Insertable Robotic Effector Platform (IREP), which is a dexterous, 2-arm snake manipulator with a motorized stereo camera system designed for SPA/NOTES procedures.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Computer Science
Thesis Advisors
Allen, Peter
Degree
M.S., Columbia University
Published Here
February 20, 2013