접촉 압력 분포를 이용한 최소 침습 수술을 위한 의료 촉진 가이던스 시스템

In this research a medical palpation guidance system for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is proposed. Palpation is a useful tool for identifying a size and location of a lump during a surgery. However, conventional manual palpation is only available in open surgery, so there has been several researches about palpation assistant or guidance system for MIS. The previously developed systems are based on a pressure based or stiffness based approach. These previous approaches have some limitations in increasing complexity of the sys-tems and lack of geometric information about the lump which is more important information for the lump removal than the stiffness information. We propose a palpation guidance system using a novel approach using contact pressure distribution. Since our approach gives the geometry information of the lump as well as the existence information, the operator can easily notice the currently identified lump region and the optimal position for the next palpation. The experiment results show that our approach can offer the geometry infor-mation of the lump correctly.