The surgeon’s eyes dart to the left, and instantly a robotic laser shifts position and gets to work on a new section of tissue. No, this is not telekinesis, but a new eye-tracking technology that could soon be giving surgeons a hand during tricky procedures.
The device has been integrated into a da Vinci surgical robot – a tool that allows surgeons to perform keyhole procedures by mimicking their hand movements. However, according to a team from the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London, surgeons often need more than two hands when it comes to positioning additional instruments such as endoscopes or lasers.
Their device uses the surgeon’s gaze to direct these tools instead. It shines an infrared LED on each eye, and cameras track the relative movement of the pupil and the “glint” of reflected light on the cornea to calculate where the surgeon is looking. The information is used to move the instrument to a new position on the patient. Since the surgeon will only want to use the feature at certain times in the procedure, the device is activated by a foot pedal.
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The team hopes to present test results at the IROS 2008 conference in Nice, France, later this month. Team member Guang-Zhong Yang claims the gaze-tracker device is accurate to within 3 millimetres, although they are hoping to improve on this. He says it should provide more instant and precise control than a human assistant. “It could be useful in cardiovascular or gastro-intestinal surgery, which require lots of complex manoeuvres,” he says.
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