SeeBelow: Sub-dermal 3D Reconstruction of Tumors with Surgical Robotic Palpation and Tactile Exploration
<|reference_start|>SeeBelow: Sub-dermal 3D Reconstruction of Tumors with Surgical Robotic Palpation and Tactile Exploration: Surgical scene understanding in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) is highly reliant on visual cues and lacks tactile perception. Force-modulated surgical palpation with tactile feedback is necessary for localization, geometry/depth estimation, and dexterous exploration of abnormal stiff inclusions in subsurface tissue layers. Prior works explored surface-level tissue abnormalities or single layered tissue-tumor embeddings with more than 300 palpations for dense 2D stiffness mapping. Our approach focuses on 3D reconstructions of sub-dermal tumor surface profiles in multi-layered tissue (skin-fat-muscle) using a visually-guided novel tactile navigation policy. A robotic palpation probe with tri-axial force sensing was leveraged for tactile exploration of the phantom. From a surface mesh of the surgical region initialized from a depth camera, the policy explores a surgeon's region of interest through palpation, sampled from bayesian optimization. Each palpation includes contour following using a contact-safe impedance controller to trace the sub-dermal tumor geometry, until the underlying tumor-tissue boundary is reached. Projections of these contour following palpation trajectories allows 3D reconstruction of the subdermal tumor surface profile in less than 100 palpations. Our approach generates high-fidelity 3D surface reconstructions of rigid tumor embeddings in tissue layers with isotropic elasticities, although soft tumor geometries are yet to be explored.<|reference_end|>
@article{uppuluri2024seebelow:,
    title={SeeBelow: Sub-dermal 3D Reconstruction of Tumors with Surgical Robotic
  Palpation and Tactile Exploration},
    author={Raghava Uppuluri, Abhinaba Bhattacharjee, Sohel Anwar, and Yu She},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.13699},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.13699},
    primaryClass={cs.RO}
}