Image-Based Virtual Fixtures for Robotic Cardiac Surgery

Image-Based Virtual Fixtures for Robotic Cardiac Surgery

  We are developing virtual fixtures for the internal mammary artery (IMA) harvest portion of robot-assisted coronary artery bypass graft procedures. A preoperative CT scan is processed to define the location of the IMA. In surgery, the patients anatomy will be registered to the image data, then a virtual fixture will constrain the instruments motions, as commanded by the surgeon, to appropriate paths adjacent to the artery. CT image processing algorithms and registration protocol were developed to extract the artery location of animal models. As a preliminary in vitro test, a virtual fixture was implemented on a commercial surgical robot system, and its effectiveness was tested on phantom models. Results from a dissection task show that execution is faster and more precise than with conventional freehand techniques.