Abstract
Surgeons can detect and characterize tumors in open surgery by palpating tissue with their fingertips, but palpation is not currently possible in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Motivated by the goal of creating an automatic palpation tool for MIS, we evaluated the SynTouch BioTac sensor’s ability to detect and characterize lumps in simulated tissue. Models were constructed from silicone rubber with rigid spheres of three sizes embedded at three depths, plus models without embedded lumps. Electrode impedance and DC pressure were recorded as each model was indented into the BioTac at sixteen indentation depths up to 4.0 mm. Support vector machine classifiers were trained on subsets of the data and tested on trials from withheld models for three tasks: lump detection, lump size characterization, and lump depth characterization. The lump detection and lump size classifiers achieved relatively high accuracies, especially at the deepest indentation depths, but the lump depth classifier performed no better than chance.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Halsted, W.S.: The results of operations for the cure of cancer of the breast performed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital from June, 1889, to January 1894. Ann. Surg. 20(5), 497–555 (1894)
Huggins, C., Johnson, M.A.: Cancer of the bladder and prostate. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 135(17), 1146–1152 (1947)
Miller, A.P., Peine, W.J., Son, J.S., Hammoud, Z.T.: Tactile imaging system for localizing lung nodules during video assisted thoracoscopic surgery. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2996–3001 (2007)
Fletcher, S.W., O’Malley, M.S., Bunce, L.A.: Physicians’ abilities to detect lumps in silicone breast models. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 253(15), 2224–2228 (1985)
Howe, R.D., Peine, W.J., Kontarinis, D.A., Son, J.S.: Remote palpation technology. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Mag. 14(3), 318–323 (1995)
Murayama, Y., Haruta, M., Hatakeyama, Y., Shiina, T., Sakuma, H., Takenoshita, S., Omata, S., Constantinou, C.E.: Development of a new instrument for examination of stiffness in the breast using haptic sensor technology. Sens. Actuators A 143(2), 430–438 (2008)
Gwilliam, J.C., Pezzementi, Z., Jantho, E., Okamura, A.M., Hsiao, S.: Human vs. robotic tactile sensing: detecting lumps in soft tissue. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Haptics Symposium, pp. 21–28 (2010)
Jia, X.S., Li, R., Srinivasan, M.A., Adelson, E.H.: Lump detection with a GelSight sensor. In: Proceedings of the IEEE World Haptics Conference, pp. 175–179 (2013)
Arian, M.S., Blaine, C.A., Loeb, G.E., Fishel, J.A.: Using the BioTac as a tumor localization tool. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Haptics Symposium, pp. 443–448 (2014)
Acknowledgements
The first author was supported by a research fellowship from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-0822. The authors would like to thank the members of the Haptics Group, in particular John C. Nappo for his assistance in model manufacturing and Alexandre Miranda Añon and Claudio Pacchierotti for their assistance in preparing this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hui, J.C.T., Kuchenbecker, K.J. (2014). Evaluating the BioTac’s Ability to Detect and Characterize Lumps in Simulated Tissue. In: Auvray, M., Duriez, C. (eds) Haptics: Neuroscience, Devices, Modeling, and Applications. EuroHaptics 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8619. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44196-1_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44196-1_36
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44195-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44196-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)