Soft Sensorised Ventriculoscopy Testbed for Robot Design and Surgical Feedback

Flexible robotic endoscopy has the potential to reduce invasiveness and improve patient outcomes in ventricular neurosurgeries. Many promising technologies exist for navigating and interacting within such highly critical and constrained spaces as the brain. With objective assessment of surgical device safety and capabilities, a standardised method of evaluation could accelerate development. We present a soft-sensorised testbed of a 1:1 scale lateral ventricle, capable of simulating procedures and measuring distributed contact forces as low as 5 mN and up to approximate to 1 N. The testbed can provide surgical device evaluation on flexible robotic demonstrators with known capabilities. For example, analytical observations from sensor data highlight tradeoffs between inherent safety from device compliance and safety from device controllability. We also demonstrate that contact feedback can improve users' manual control, with a reduction in maximum unwanted contact forces of at least 20%. With improvements to the realism of the testbed and customisation of sensor distribution for specific surgical procedures, there is potential for utility beyond robotic design and control evaluation and towards surgeon training or even pre-operative planning.