Enhanced Vision System to improve safety in Robotic Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery

Minimally invasive abdominal surgery can reduce the trauma of large wound to a minimum, but introduces technical difficulties for the surgeon, who has to deal with at least three instruments in a single incision. These drawbacks can be overcome with the introduction of robotic arms inside the abdominal cavity. In this work we propose an architecture to increase the safety during intra-operative robotic Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery (SILS) based on intraoperative registration of pre-operative images and dynamic active constraints. In the pre-operative phase the surface rendering of organs allows the surgeon to identify important structures to be protected during the surgery. A subsequent step consists in registering these images to the intraoperative images acquired using on board stereo-cameras. The precision of this latter step is highly dependent on the stereo vision calibration of the imaging system. We present the evaluation of the accuracy of our stereo imaging system. Preliminary results show that the number of frames for high quality stereo camera calibration is 35. In this case, the camera calibration accuracy satisfies the clinical requirements for organ motion tracking.