Munford Maxwell J, Rodriguez Y Baena Ferdinando, Bowyer Stuart
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Robot AI. 2019 Aug 16;6:66. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00066. eCollection 2019.
The increasing use of surgical robotics has provoked the necessity for new medical imaging methods. Many assistive surgical robotic systems influence the surgeon's movements based on a model of constraints and boundaries driven by anatomy. This study aims to demonstrate that Near-Infrared Fluorescence (NIRF) imaging could be applied in surgical applications to provide subsurface mapping of capillaries beneath soft tissue as a method for imaging active constraints. The manufacture of a system for imaging in the near-infrared wavelength range is presented, followed by a description of computational methods for stereo-post-processing and data acquisition and testing used to demonstrate that the proposed methods are viable. The results demonstrate that it is possible to use NIRF for the imaging of a capillary submersed up to 11 mm below a soft tissue phantom, over a range of angles from 0° through 45°. Phantom depth has been measured to an accuracy of ±3 mm and phantom angle to a constant accuracy of ±1.6°. These findings suggest that NIRF could be used for the next generation of medical imaging in surgical robotics and provide a basis for future research into real-time depth perception in the mapping of active constraints.
手术机器人的使用日益增加，引发了对新医学成像方法的需求。许多辅助手术机器人系统基于由解剖结构驱动的约束和边界模型来影响外科医生的动作。本研究旨在证明近红外荧光（NIRF）成像可应用于手术中，以提供软组织下方毛细血管的地下映射，作为一种对活动约束进行成像的方法。本文介绍了一种用于近红外波长范围成像的系统的制造方法，随后描述了用于立体后处理、数据采集和测试的计算方法，以证明所提出的方法是可行的。结果表明，在0°至45°的一系列角度范围内，可以使用近红外荧光对浸没在软组织模型下方达11毫米深处的毛细血管进行成像。已测量出模型深度的精度为±3毫米，模型角度的精度恒定为±1.6°。这些发现表明，近红外荧光可用于手术机器人的下一代医学成像，并为未来在活动约束映射中的实时深度感知研究提供基础。
