Robotic assisted laparoscopy

Keywords : Augmented reality, Robotic endoscope holder, Minimally invasive surgery, Pelvic lymphadenectomy, Computer-assisted surgery, in vivo evaluation

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Augmented reality for sentinel lymph node localization using cobotic laparoscopic holder

Laparoscopic holder used in pre-clinical studies

Background

The project was born from the collaboration of the gynecology department of Hautepierre Strasbourg University Hospital, the IHU, the ICube laboratory and the company Axilum Robotics. The challenge was to help surgeons to localize pelvic sentinel lymph nodes, using a minimally invasive approach. The Axilum Robotics cobot, initially used as a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation coil holder, was adapted and used to carry and localize a clinical laparoscope. Computational Surgery works on appropriate spatial registration algorithms, developed to visualize the preoperative data (SPECT-CT) in the laparoscopic image continuously and in real time.

Impact

Augmented Reality-based robotic assistance system that performed real-time multimodal and temporal fusion of laparoscopic images with preoperative medical images, thus enabling the detection of Sentinel Lymph Nodes and their surrounding anatomical structures during pelvic lymphadenectomy was superior for the detection of important structures compared to Direct Vision. This rigid registration AR approach is a first step to facilitate complex procedures and increase surgical safety.