Attention-aware robotic laparoscope for human-robot cooperative surgery

Current laparoscopic surgeries suffer from inconvenient, limited visualization due to the small incisions. It normally needs an assistant to hold and readjust a laparoscope to view the surgical set when performing procedures. This assistant can be either a human or a robotic laparoscope holder. However, at the current state, both of them only passively follow the control commands from the surgeon (The human assistant relies on the surgeon's verbal communications and the robotic holder is controlled by the voice or joystick/buttons), whenever the laparoscope needs to be readjusted. The surgeon's explicit intervention in laparoscope readjustment might bring extra mental and physical burdens to him/her. In this paper, the work of granting attention-awareness to a robotic laparoscope holder is presented. The robot can actively observe the surgeon's viewing attention by tracking the surgeon's eye movements and automatically adjust the laparoscope's view correspondingly. Our experimental results demonstrated that this system effectively released the surgeon from the intervention of the laparoscope, which could eliminate the visualization barriers of laparoscopic surgeries, reduce the learning curve in laparoscopic surgeries, and reduce the operation time and cost.