Intelligent Surgical Robots with Situational Awareness

This article discusses various challenges and puts forth the concepts of intelligent surgical robots and complementary situational awareness (CSA) as a means for achieving new surgical systems with unprecedented capabilities in terms of safety, ease of operation, and exact execution of pre-operative surgical plans. Situational awareness is defined in accordance with by the three stages of sensory acquisition, sensory comprehension, and projection. A robotic system with CSA assists the user not only in manipulation, but also in forming the situational awareness regarding the task at hand by using perception resources beyond the capabilities of the user. In the future, it is expected that CSA systems will increasingly be embedded within a larger framework of Computer-Integrated Interventional Medicine, in which patient-specific information such as images, lab results, and genomics are combined with general knowledge to model and diagnose the patients’ condition and to develop an optimized treatment plan.