Experimental evaluation of magnified haptic feedback for robot-assisted needle insertion and palpation

Background Haptic feedback has been proven to play a key role in enhancing the performance of teleoperated medical procedures. However, due to safety issues, commercially-available medical robots do not currently provide the clinician with haptic feedback. Methods This work presents the experimental evaluation of a teleoperation system for robot-assisted medical procedures able to provide magnified haptic feedback to the clinician. Forces registered at the operating table are magnified and provided to the clinician through a 7-DoF haptic interface. The same interface is also used to control the motion of a 6-DoF slave robotic manipulator. The safety of the system is guaranteed by a time-domain passivity-based control algorithm. Results Two experiments were carried out on stiffness discrimination (during palpation and needle insertion) and one experiment on needle guidance. Conclusions Our haptic-enabled teleoperation system improved the performance with respect to direct hand interaction of 80%, 306%, and 27% in stiffness discrimination through palpation, stiffness discrimination during needle insertion, and guidance, respectively.