Towards Bimanual Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery: Tool-to-Sclera Force Evaluation

The performance of retinal microsurgery often requires the coordinated use of both hands. During bimanual retinal surgery, dominant hand performance may be negatively impacted by poor non-dominant hand assistance. Therefore understanding bimanual latent determinants, and establishing safety criteria for bimanual manipulation is relevant to robotic development and to eventual patient care. In this paper, we present a preliminary study to quantitatively evaluate one aspect of bimanual tool use in retinal surgery. Two force sensing tools were designed and fabricated using fiber Bragg grating sensors. Tool-to-sclera contact force is measured using the developed tools and analyzed. The tool forces were recorded during five basic surgical maneuvers typical of retinal surgery. Two subjects are involved in experiments, including one clinician and one engineer. For comparison, all manipulations were replicated under robot-assisted conditions. The results indicate that the average tool-to-sclera force recorded from the dominant hand tool is significantly higher than that from the non-dominant hand tool (\pmb p=0.004). Moreover, the average forces under robot-assisted conditions with the present steady hand robot is notably higher than freehand conditions (\pmb p=0.01). The forces obtained from the dominant and not-dominant hand instruments indicate a weak correlation.