A concept on Cooperative Tele-Surgical System based on Image-Guiding and robotic technology

In our research group at the BART LAB, Mahidol University, Thailand, we have been conducting research on Computer-Integrated Surgery an/d Robot-Assisted Surgery for the past 8 years. The research involved several surgical applications, such as, laparoscopic surgery, percutaneous breast biopsy, neurosurgery, total-knee replacement and closed intramedullary of femur. Our experience included development of a novel 4-DOF wire-driven laparoscopic surgical robot, development of image-guided endoscopic robot, endoscopic tracking using electromagnetic field, development of total-knee replacement surgical planning and surgical robot, development of a robot-guiding system for closed intramedullary nailing of femur, development of a percutaneous ultrasound image-guided breast biopsy, development of a force-feedback haptic interface for surgical training, investigation on neurosurgical robot and investigation on intracranial pressure sensing system. This study is to develop a large-scale tele-surgical system which allows an expert-surgeon group to remotely work incorporate with a field-surgeon group based on image guiding and robotic technology. The tele-surgical system is separated into 3 sections: (1) Expert Site, (2) Surgical Site and (3) TeleCommunication for Surgery. The Expert Station is for the expert-surgeons to remotely control the surgical robots at the Surgical Station through a 3-D force-feedback haptic robot controller. The Expert Station is equipped with a set of monitors to display the real-time image from surgical site, the sensing data from the patients and the pre-operative medical images. The Surgical Station is for the field-surgeons which may have less experience than the expert-surgeons in Expert-Station. The field-surgeons are working on the surgical operation with the cooperative-typed surgical robots which are remotely-controlled by the expert-surgeons. The Surgical Station is also equipped with a surgical navigation system, surgeon tracking system and the sensing units. The communications between both stations are designed to perform redundancy based on multi-system which are; LANs, 3G, WiMAX and Satellite. The Cooperative Tele-Surgical System is designed and developed for the remote hospital and the field hospital.