A Digital Stereo Microscope Platform for Microsurgery Training - Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence - page 295

This allows highly dexterous manipulations to be made at small scale of movement.
The surgical manipulations use these degrees of freedom of the hand to produce
smooth and precise movements. However, the increased degree of freedom also al-
lows the same movement to be made in multiple ways. When there are multiple
movement that depict the same motion profile, the preferred motion must be assessed.
The system provides a means to capture the motion in fine details as well as allows to
express the motion using the natural freedom of the hand through the use of the digital
forceps.
Secondly, surgeons are able to achieve hand-eye coordination by placing hands
along the line of sight of the field of view. It is the natural configuration in an unaided
surgery and is a means of achieving better task performance [2-8].
Thirdly, merging multiple streams of video, both live and stored, to create surgical
task contexts, is another advantage of the system. Finally, a number of functions are
available to objectively assess aspects of the surgical motion. It can improve the
surgeon in producing better surgical movements through realtime feedback. For pro-
ducing specific types of motion, many surgical motion training systems can be de-
signed.
In Fig.1, two surgical motion training targets which will be placed under an intelli-
gent digital stereo microscope are shown. The training targets provide dexterous mo-
tion challenges very similar to the dexterity challenges encountered in surgery. The
task targets may be oriented to present the complex anatomical orientations encoun-
tered in the surgery.
Fig. 1. Surgical motion training targets
Our study is unique in two aspects. This is the first study that constructed a hand-eye-
colocated digital microscope to provide a surgery training platform. It is the first study
where surgical motion elements, such as measurement noise, physiological tremor, and
involuntary movements, are separated to study surgical motion performance.
The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, related work is discussed. Different
existing methods of analyzing signals are discussed with ways of incorporating them into
a training device. In section 3, the digital stereo microscope design and experimental