Task
1.3: Surgical Enhancement began with initial investigations
into hidden Markov models as a means for recognizing surgical actions.
Core funding, plus an NSF RHA grant, supported work on vision-guided
virtual fixtures and related studies of their efficacy for improving
the speed and accuracy of fine-scale motion tasks. An NSF ITR grant
has provided support to develop an architecture that integrates task
modeling, human-motion modeling using HMMs, and online human-machine
task synchronization with lower-level motion augmentation primitives.
This project is targeting retinal vein cannulation, retinal membrane
peeling and micro-suturing. In recent work, we have developed a platform-independent
architecture for specifying and executing surgical assistance tasks.
A recent NSF SBIR grant with Invenios, Inc. is evaluating the commercial
potential of human-machine collaborative systems for both manufacturing
and surgical applications. In addition, we have now applied virtual
fixtures to telemanipulation systems with various underlying control
laws and demonstrated that such systems can be made stable (and therefore
safe for application in the OR).