Guiding the surgical gesture using an electro-tactile stimulus array on the tongue: A feasibility study

Under conventional "open-" surgery, the physician has to take care of the patient, interact with other clinicians and check several monitoring devices. Nowadays, the computer assisted surgery proposes to integrate 3-D cameras in the operating theatre in order to assist the surgeon in performing minimally invasive surgical punctures. The cameras localize the needle and the computer guides the surgeon towards an intracorporeal clinically defined target. A visualization system (screen) is employed to provide the surgeon with indirect visual spatial information about the intracorporeal positions of the needle. The present work proposes to use another sensory modality to guide the surgeon, thus keeping the visual modality fully dedicated to the surgical gesture. For this, the sensory substitution paradigm using the Bach-y-Rita's "Tongue Display Unit" (TDU) is exploited to provide to the surgeon information of the position tool. The TDU device is composed of a 6 x 6 matrix of electrodes transmitting electrotactile information on the tongue surface. The underlying idea consists in transmitting information about the deviation of the needle movement with regard to a preplanned "optimal" trajectory. We present an experiment assessing the guidance effectiveness of an intracorporeal puncture under TDU guidance with respect to the performance evidenced under a usual visual guidance system.