Abstract
Purpose :
Robot assistance (RA) can improve a surgeon’s skills, improve the reproducibility of existing procedures and enable the development of new, high-precision procedures. The PRECEYES Surgical System (www.preceyes.nl) is developed to assist in vitreoretinal (VR) surgery. Using a motion controller coupled to an instrument manipulator, instruments are controlled with high precision. In this study, positional accuracy and precision of both manual and RA instrument positioning in a VR surgery setting are compared.
Methods :
Positional precision and steadiness are measured via a tracing test (Figure 1). To simulate a dynamic motion task, the surgeon moves the tip of an instrument along a square. To simulate a static task, the surgeon is asked to freeze the instrument at the corners of the square. Image analysis is used to calculate both accuracy and precision for XY and Z. Accuracy is defined by the distance between the instrument tip and the target. Precision is defined by the distance between consecutive tip positions. Each test was carried out by experienced and beginning surgeons, and repeated 3 times in a manual, an automatic and an RA setting each.
Results :
All results are compared to the results of the tasks in the manual setting. In an automatic setting, accuracy and precision improve >68 and >12.5 times, respectively. In the RA setting, beginning surgeons improve both accuracy and precision >2.1 times for dynamic tasks, whilst experienced surgeons perform similar or improve only slightly. For static tasks however, accuracy and precision improve >1.9 and >3.6 times, respectively, in an RA setting for all surgeons.
Conclusions :
Accuracy and precision are improved using RA of the PRECEYES Surgical System. RA is most beneficial to beginning surgeons, whilst experienced surgeons specifically benefit from RA in static tasks.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.