Development of a Haptic Interface for Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery Simulation

Natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) is a minimally invasive procedure, which utilizes the body's natural orifices to gain access to the peritoneal cavity. The NOTES procedure is designed to minimize external scarring and patient trauma, however flexible endoscopy based pure NOTES procedures require critical scope handling skills. The delicate nature of the NOTES procedure requires extensive training. Thus, to improve access to training while reducing risk to patients, we have designed and developed the VTEST, a virtual reality NOTES simulator. As part of the simulator, a novel decoupled 2-DOF haptic device was developed to provide realistic force feedback to the user in training. A series of experiments were performed to determine the behavioral characteristics of the device. The device was found capable of rendering up to 5.62N and 0.190 Nm of continuous force and torque in the translational and rotational DOF, respectively. The device possesses 18.1 and 5.7 Hz of force bandwidth in the translational and rotational DOF, respectively. A feedforward friction compensator was also successfully implemented to minimize the negative impact of friction during the interaction with the device. In this work, we have presented the detailed development and evaluation of the haptic device for the VTEST.