Tissue palpation in endoscopy using EIT and soft actuators.
| Autor: | Alian A; The Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom., Avery J; The Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom., Mylonas G; The Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom. |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Zdroj: | Frontiers in robotics and AI [Front Robot AI] 2024 Aug 09; Vol. 11, pp. 1372936. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Aug 09 (Print Publication: 2024). |
| DOI: | 10.3389/frobt.2024.1372936 |
| Abstrakt: | The integration of soft robots in medical procedures has significantly improved diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, addressing safety concerns and enhancing surgeon dexterity. In conjunction with artificial intelligence, these soft robots hold the potential to expedite autonomous interventions, such as tissue palpation for cancer detection. While cameras are prevalent in surgical instruments, situations with obscured views necessitate palpation. This proof-of-concept study investigates the effectiveness of using a soft robot integrated with Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) capabilities for tissue palpation in simulated in vivo inspection of the large intestine. The approach involves classifying tissue samples of varying thickness into healthy and cancerous tissues using the shape changes induced on a hydraulically-driven soft continuum robot during palpation. Shape changes of the robot are mapped using EIT, providing arrays of impedance measurements. Following the fabrication of an in-plane bending soft manipulator, the preliminary tissue phantom design is detailed. The phantom, representing the descending colon wall, considers induced stiffness by surrounding tissues based on a mass-spring model. The shape changes of the manipulator, resulting from interactions with tissues of different stiffness, are measured, and EIT measurements are fed into a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) classifier. Train and test datasets are collected as temporal sequences of data from a single training phantom and two test phantoms, namely, A and B, possessing distinctive thickness patterns. The collected dataset from phantom B, which differs in stiffness distribution, remains unseen to the network, thus posing challenges to the classifier. The classifier and proposed method achieve an accuracy of 93 % and 88.1 % on phantom A and B, respectively. Classification results are presented through confusion matrices and heat maps, visualising the accuracy of the algorithm and corresponding classified tissues. Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. (Copyright © 2024 Alian, Avery and Mylonas.) |
| Databáze: | MEDLINE |
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