Precision minimally invasive surgery by adaptive organ motion tracking and compensation

A fully integrated 3-axis robotic motion tracking and compensation system has been developed to compensate for and track periodic and quasi-periodic organ motion present during surgery resulting from cardiac and respiratory rhythms. The Z-axis motion compensation is achieved by using a fiber-optic laser sensor to obtain precise displacement measurements. Adaptive and predictive signal processing techniques are used to develop a novel motion compensation algorithm that results in a compensated Z-axis motion tracking the organ movement. The X-Y motion tracking uses a custom VLS1 chip, modeled as a foveated silicon retina, for precision targeting in the X-Y plane. A surgical probe is moved in response to the motion compensation algorithms and the optical tracking chip. Compensated motion tracking, with less that 10% targeting error, has been demonstrated in a rodent heart model system. Using a complementary algorithm, artifacts due to respiratory motion have also been extracted.