Robot Assisted Electrical Impedance Tomography System for Minimally Invasive Surgery

This study presents the development of a robot assisted electrical impedance scanning system able to reconstruct Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) during surgical inspection. This system can be directly applied on most existing minimally invasive surgical robots without introducing additional sensor probes to the operating site or modifying the existing surgical tools. By positioning two robotic forceps as electrodes to several positions on the tissue surface and performing electrical measurements, the system is able to obtain electrical information and use them for reconstructing the conductivity distribution using the EIT algorithm. This paper describes the system construction, sensing pattern and reconstruction algorithm in detail. In addition, the developed system is optimized using finite element simulation and evaluated through two realistic experiments. The generated EIT images are able to show the location of the non-homogeneous structure from the surrounding tissue effectively. These results demonstrate the great potential of the proposed system to assist surgeons in detecting subsurface target area of interest.