Kinesthetic and vibrotactile haptic feedback improves the performance of laser microsurgery

The lack of haptic feedback during laser surgery procedures prevents surgeons from accurately discerning the depth of the incisions they perform. In this paper we introduce a novel teleoperated surgical platform, which employs a commercial haptic device to convey information about the laser incision depth to the surgeon. The incision depth is estimated by a feed forward model that maps the laser parameters selected by the surgeon and the total time of laser exposure to the resulting ablation depth. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system in enabling precise laser ablation. The experiment involved ten human subjects who were asked to complete a single-point laser ablation task. Results show that haptic feedback can significantly improve the level of surgical precision of laser interventions.