Haptics in Robot-Assisted Surgery: Challenges and Benefits

Robotic surgery is transforming the current surgical practice, not only by improving the conventional surgical methods but also by introducing innovative robot-enhanced approaches that broaden the capabilities of clinicians. Being mainly of man-machine collaborative type, surgical robots are seen as media that transfer pre- and intraoperative information to the operator and reproduce his/her motion, with appropriate filtering, scaling, or limitation, to physically interact with the patient. The field, however, is far from maturity and, more critically, is still a subject of controversy in medical communities. Limited or absent haptic feedback is reputed to be among reasons that impede further spread of surgical robots. In this paper, objectives and challenges of deploying haptic technologies in surgical robotics are discussed, and a systematic review is performed on works that have studied the effects of providing haptic information to the users in major branches of robotic surgery. It attempts to encompass both classical works and the state-of-the-art approaches, aiming at delivering a comprehensive and balanced survey both for researchers starting their work in this field and for the experts.