Preoperative setup planning for robotic surgery based on a simulation platform and Gaussian process

For the robotically-assisted minimally invasive surgery, preoperative planning is essential towards assisting surgeons to prepare the intervention and to decide the best access to the surgical site. Many recent studies in preoperative planning cannot evaluate the performance of the multi-arm cooperation, and thus their applications are constrained in real practise with multi-arm surgical robots. In this paper, we establish a simulation platform of a three-arm surgical robot. We propose to use two objective functions, Global Isotropy Index (GII) and Cooperation Capability Index (CCI), to reflect the dexterity of a robot arm and the performance of the multi-arm cooperation respectively. We also propose to use Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to locate the optimal port placement and robot positioning. Simulation experiments are carried out to validate our method. The results demonstrate that our proposed performance optimization strategy based on GP is capable to guide surgeons to plan an intervention with the multi-arm surgical robot.