Beating heart tracking in robotic surgery using 500Hz visual servoing

This paper presents first in-vivo results of beating heart tracking with a surgical robot arm in off-pump cardiac surgery. The tracking is performed in a 2D visual servoing scheme using a 500 frame per second video camera. Heart motion is measured by means of active optical markers that are put onto the heart surface. Amplitude of the motion is evaluated along the two axis of the image reference frame. This is a complex and fast motion that mainly reflects the influence of both the respiratory motion and the electro-mechanical activity of the myocardium. A model predictive controller is setup to track the two degrees of freedom of the observed motion by computing velocities for two of the robot joints. The servoing scheme takes advantage of the ability of predictive control to anticipate over future references provided they are known or they can be predicted. An adaptive observer is defined along with a simple cardiac model to estimate the two components of the heart motion. The predictions are then fed into the controller references and it is shown that the tracking behavior is greatly improved.