Evaluation of haptic in robotic heart surgery

Abstract The introduction of telemanipulator systems into cardiac surgery enables the heart surgeon to perform sophisticated mini-invasive and endoscopic procedures with high precision under stereoscopic view. At present, the commercially available robotic surgical systems do not dispose of force feedback for the operating surgeon. The lack of haptic (force or tactile) feedback causes damage of tissue and bending or breaking of suture material. For further improvement of telemanipulated systems, we implemented haptic into a realistic experimental platform to evaluate force-feedback for robotic heart surgery.