Towards Autonomous Eye Surgery by Combining Deep Imitation Learning with Optimal Control

Ji Woong Kim, Peiyao Zhang, Peter Gehlbach, Iulian Iordachita, Marin Kobilarov

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

During retinal microsurgery, precise manipulation of the delicate retinal tissue is required for positive surgical outcome. However, accurate manipulation and navigation of surgical tools remain difficult due to a constrained workspace and the top-down view during the surgery, which limits the surgeon's ability to estimate depth. To alleviate such difficulty, we propose to automate the tool-navigation task by learning to predict relative goal position on the retinal surface from the current tool-tip position. Given an estimated target on the retina, we generate an optimal trajectory leading to the predicted goal while imposing safety-related physical constraints aimed to minimize tissue damage. As an extended task, we generate goal predictions to various points across the retina to localize eye geometry and further generate safe trajectories within the estimated confines. Through experiments in both simulation and with several eye phantoms, we demonstrate that our framework can permit navigation to various points on the retina within 0.089mm and 0.118mm in xy error which is less than the human's surgeon mean tremor at the tool-tip of 0.180mm. All safety constraints were fulfilled and the algorithm was robust to previously unseen eyes as well as unseen objects in the scene. Live video demonstration is available here: https://youtu.be/n5j5jCCelXk.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2347-2358
Number of pages12
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume155
StatePublished - 2020
Event4th Conference on Robot Learning, CoRL 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Nov 16 2020Nov 18 2020

Keywords

  • deep imitation learning
  • eye surgery
  • ophthalmology
  • optimal control

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Statistics and Probability

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Towards Autonomous Eye Surgery by Combining Deep Imitation Learning with Optimal Control'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this