Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States and also a major disease worldwide with over 700,000 coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures performed annually all around the world, of which 350,000 are performed in the United States. The use of mechanical stabilizers in the CABG procedures can cause irreversible local damage by traumatizing the underlying microcirculation. The primary goal of this research is to develop effective haptic and visual servoing methods, with the eventual goal of eliminating the need for mechanical stabilizers in a CABG procedure by presenting a stationary operative site to the surgeon performing the procedure using haptic and visual feedback. We present in this paper the results from our initial work in the area of tracking a deformable membrane using vision and providing haptic feedback to the user based on the vision information and the material properties of the membrane. In our first experiment, we track the ...
Christopher W. Kennedy, Tie Hu, Jaydev P. Desai