Learning laparoscopic surgery by imitation using robot trainer

Laparoscopic surgery requires rigorous training in order to overcome physical, spatial and visual constraints. We are developing a laparoscopic robot trainer. The robot trainer can learn the motion of the master surgeon when he is performing a virtual surgery, and drive the surgical tool by mimicking the learnt trajectory during training. This paper reports our investigation on robot learning using learning by imitation for surgical training. The feasibility of implementing this innovative learning method is demonstrated with recent results on the robot trainer, and experiments involving our laparoscopic surgery trainer box and computer vision system.