Visual Servoing-Based Endoscopic Path Following for Robot-Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery

Robot-assisted surgical procedures require to generate paths for surgical instruments during a planning step and then to follow automatically the computed trajectories as close as possible. Most of the existing procedures use external localization devices to control the robot. However, these devices are not adequate for minimally invasive interventions such as laparoscopic surgery because this kind of surgery involves large lever effects which make high accuracy unreachable. In this paper, we propose a path following method based on the use of the endoscopic camera and instruments with markers. It mainly stands on an image-based visual servoing scheme and on the estimation of the 3D position of the incision point in the abdominal wall. We show that this method can lead to precise tracking despite the errors on the position of the incision point. The proposed method is finally demonstrated in vitro in an automatic suturing intervention.