A Cognitive Architecture for Robot-Assisted Surgical Procedures

Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS) procedures typically require the presence of two expert figures in the operating room (OR): the main surgeon, sitting at the console of a teleoperated surgical robot, and the assistant surgeon, who performs secondary operations directly on the patient by means of manual tools. In this paper we propose a novel strategy to allow the execution of a RAMIS procedure by a single surgeon, robotizing the role of the assistant surgeon. In addition to the teleoperation system used by the main surgeon, the architecture is augmented with an action recognition module, that recognize the operations the surgeon is performing, and a supervisory controller, which takes decisions according to the procedure state. The autonomous robotic arm serves as an assistant surgeon and it is equipped by a surgical tool to accomplish the required tasks. The proposed solution has been validated on a simplified physical set-up, with the aim of verifying and confirming its applicability and effectiveness. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)