Autonomous Laparoscope Control for Minimally Invasive Surgery With Intuition and RCM Constraints

The automated laparoscope control can ensure the stability of the laparoscopic image and enhance the performance of surgeons during surgical operations. The letter presented a method that autonomously adjusted the laparoscope pose to obtain the optimal field of view (FOV). An optimization problem was constructed to generate the laparoscope pose, which provided the optimal FOV, based on the domain knowledge extracted from expert surgeons’ experience. Furthermore, an image-based algorithm to perceive the position of the surgical instruments’ tool-tips in real-time was developed. Because the RCM constraint of the laparoscope can cause image misorientation as the laparoscope moves around, we presented a new intuition criterion to minimize the misorientation of FOV. We presented a new intuition criterion to minimize the misorientation of FOV. Finally, a control framework that could accomplish the autonomous laparoscope control with the RCM constraint and the intuition constraint was proposed. The simulation and experiment results demonstrated the validity of our method for automated laparoscope control.