Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) and Robot-Assisted MIS play an important role in modern surgery, providing several advantages
over traditional open surgery. MIS and RMIS procedures involve a team of several people in the operating room (OR), including an
assistant surgeon, which is an expert surgeon, that supports the main surgeon but is active only for 30% of an operation. This is very
inefficient from both an economic and a social perspective.
The “Trustworthy Robotic Assistant for Improved Minimally Invasive Surgery” (TRAMIS) project aims at moving a step further
towards the introduction into the OR of an autonomous robotic assistant that can support the surgeon during MIS and RMIS
procedures. The TRAMIS robot assistant will rely on (1) advanced perception from semantic scene understanding, thanks to the
design of trustworthy deep-learning algorithms for intra-operative image analysis (2) safe and efficient robot planning and control to
allow the robot to adapt its behavior to the rapidly changing environment and move in a natural and safe way while maximizing the
efficiency of its behavior. Surgeon’s (3) ergonomy assessment will further provide postural suggestions to the surgeon, while (4)
performance assessment and errors detection will possibly make the robot adapt its behavior to improve ergonomy and mitigate
errors.
The TRAMIS robot assistant will be experimentally validated: (1) at the Advanced Training and Medical Simulation Centre of the
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in a Partial Nephrectomy (PN) procedure executed on a phantom by expert urologists (2) at
the Orsi Academy, in a robot-assisted PN executed on a phantom where the surgeon will use the Da Vinci robot, with the assistance
of the robotic assistant. The phantom used in the validation will reproduce the anatomical structures of the patient’s body. Although
the project is focused on PN and Robotic-Assisted PN as use case, however the methodology and the developed system may also
be exploited and used for other MIS and RMIS procedures.
With TRAMIS, we expect to move the state of the art on RMIS forward by providing a trustworthy robot assistant, paving the way for
a new generation of surgical robots to support surgeons by providing them with decision support and context awareness, with the
ultimate goal of increasing patients’ safety.