Organizations: Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, 464-8603, Japan · Department of Micro–Nano Mechanical Science and Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, 464-8603, Japan · Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, 464-8603, Japan · Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, 464-8603, Japan
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) requires advanced micromanipulation techniques but relies solely on visual feedback and involves frequent interface switching between pipette movement and injector operations. Existing haptic feedback systems primarily focus on pipette puncture forces and do not provide feedback on injector states. We developed an immersive micromanipulation system that unifies operational interfaces and provides McKibben-based haptic sensations to represent aspiration, discharge, and contact between the oocyte and pipette. Users operated both the pipette and injector with a single hand while receiving haptic sensations. A human-participant experiment revealed that the immersive operation interface improved micromanipulation speed and reduced cognitive workload of the micromanipulation compared with conventional methods. Additionally, McKibben-based haptic sensations improved overall system usability. The immersive micromanipulation system with McKibben-based haptic sensations successfully unified operational interfaces and reduced operator workload.
Input devices for robotic microsurgery are frequently described as preserving the surgeon's trained technique, but the claim is rarely measured. We compared manual and teleoperated intraocular instrument motion with the trocar constraint, the instrument, the eye model and the tracking source common to both conditions, so that the control interface was the only factor varied. Prior comparisons cannot hold the instrument fixed, because a robotic instrument is not the tool used manually. Sixteen participants performed a navigation task on a commercial ophthalmic simulator by hand and through a three-degree-of-freedom input device commanding a five-joint robot. Task outcome was equal but at ceiling: every participant acquired all five targets under both interfaces with no retinal or lens injury. Execution differed on every measure. Teleoperated trials took three times as long at a quarter of the median speed, covered less than half the angular working range, and were broken into 3.5 times as many separate movements. Completion time and movement fragmentation improved substantially across four trials of practice and had not plateaued; the measures set by the configured rate ceiling and joint limit changed the least. Finger activity doubled and pinch variability tripled, so reducing instrument degrees of freedom redistributed manual effort rather than reducing it. The interface preserves the outcome and reshapes the execution.
Robotic ophthalmic surgery offers high precision but introduces a "sensory gap" by decoupling the surgeon from their instrument, resulting in a loss of tactile feedback. This paper presents a novel haptic feedback system for subretinal injection tasks leveraging Scene Graphs (SG). The system bridges the sensory gap by analyzing a physically simulated intraoperative Optical Coherence Tomography (iOCT) feed to construct a real-time surgical SG. The SG serves as a semantic abstraction layer for the surgical scene, which is then utilized by a deterministic, rule-based engine to generate state-dependent haptic feedback on a robotic input device. The system was evaluated in a user study (N=16) using an anthropomorphic head phantom and a custom-built surgical robot. Results demonstrate that the SG-driven haptic feedback improved surgical precision, reducing needle alignment error by 14% (p = 0.044) and improving System Usability Scale (SUS) scores by 8% (p = 0.015), while maintaining comparable task completion times. A needle trajectory analysis revealed the emergence of a safer "Align-then-Approach" strategy, in which our haptic negative reinforcement prompted users to fine-tune the tool's trajectory before approaching the retinal target. This work suggests that SGs can effectively serve as the direct computational foundation for real-time, safety-enhancing context-aware haptic feedback in robotic microsurgery.
Robotic-assisted surgery offers significant clinical advantages but largely eliminates direct haptic feedback, increasing the risk of excessive tool-tissue interaction forces. Although recent commercial systems have begun to introduce force feedback, their high cost limits accessibility, particularly for surgical training. This paper presents a modular experimental robotic laparoscopic instrument integrated with a real-time haptic feedback framework. The proposed instrument employs a wrist-mounted force/torque (F/T) sensor to estimate tool-tissue interaction forces while avoiding the durability and integration challenges of tip-mounted sensors. A haptic feedback framework is developed to extract the external contact forces, render them to the haptic device, and generate stable and perceptually meaningful feedback. The instrument is integrated into the robotic surgery training system (RoboScope) and evaluated through a controlled user study involving a force regulation task. Experimental results demonstrate that haptic feedback significantly improves task success rate, force regulation accuracy, and task efficiency compared to visual-only feedback. The proposed instrument enables stable, high-fidelity haptic interaction, supporting effective robotic surgery training.