Autonomous robotic suction to clear the surgical field for hemostasis using image-based blood flow detection

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021

Florian Richter, Shihao Shen, Fei Liu, Jingbin Huang, Emily K Funk, Ryan K Orosco, Michael C Yip

Publisher Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9343724/

Abstract: Autonomous robotic surgery has seen significant progression over the last decade with the aims of reducing surgeon fatigue, improving procedural consistency, and perhaps one day take over surgery itself. However, automation has not been applied to the critical surgical task of controlling tissue and blood vessel bleeding-known as hemostasis. The task of hemostasis covers a spectrum of bleeding sources and a range of blood velocity, trajectory, and volume. In an extreme case, an un-controlled blood vessel fills the surgical field with flowing blood. In this work, we present the first, automated solution for hemostasis through development of a novel probabilistic blood flow detection algorithm and a trajectory generation technique that guides autonomous suction tools towards pooling blood. The blood flow detection algorithm is tested in both simulated scenes and in a real-life trauma scenario involving a …

Richter et al. (2021) Autonomous robotic suction to clear the surgical field for hemostasis using image-based blood flow detection, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 1383-1390.