A Pilot Study of Robot-Assisted Cochlear Implant Surgery Using Steerable Electrode Arrays
This paper presents results of a pilot study evaluating the efficacy of robotic assistance using novel steerable electrode arrays for cochlear implant surgery. The current surgical setup of cochlear implant surgery is briefly reviewed and its limitations are highlighted. In an effort to reduce trauma to the structure of the cochlea, the kinematics and path planning for novel cochlear steerable electrodes are developed to minimize the interaction forces between the electrode and the cochlea. An experimental robotic system is used to compare the electrode insertion forces of steerable implants with those of nonsteerable electrodes. The results of these experiments show about 70% reduction in the insertion forces when steerable electrodes are used with our proposed path planning and control. A distance metric explaining this reduction in the insertion force is defined and experimentally validated. Although this is only a preliminary study, we believe that these results provide a strong indication to the potential of robot-assisted cochlear implant surgery to provide a significant reduction in trauma rates during cochlear implant surgery.

title: System design of an Insertable Robotic Effector Platform for Single Port Access (SPA) Surgery
abstract: This paper presents a novel design and preliminary kinematic analysis of an Insertable Robotic Effector Platform (IREP) for Single Port Access (SPA) Surgery. The IREP robot can be deployed into body cavity through a Ø15mm skin incision to perform SPA procedures. It consists of two snake-like continuum robots as slave surgical assistants for tissue manipulation, two parallelogram mechanisms for the continuum robots' placement, and one controllable stereo vision module with integrated light source for depth perception and tool tracking. Design considerations and alternatives, calculations and preliminary simulations of this 17-DoF surgical robotic system are presented in this paper. The overall control system hierarchy for tele-manipulation using the IREP robot is also presented.

title: Design and Integration of a Telerobotic System for Minimally Invasive Surgery of the Throat
abstract: In this paper we present the clinical motivation, design specifications, kinematics, statics, and actuation compensation for a newly constructed telerobotic system for Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) of the throat. A hybrid dual-arm telesurgical slave, with 20 joint-space Degrees-of-Freedom (DoFs), is used in this telerobotic system to provide the necessary dexterity in deep surgical fields such as the throat. The telerobotic slave uses novel continuum robots that use multiple super-elastic backbones for actuation and structural integrity. We present the kinematics of the telesurgical slave and methods for actuation compensation to cancel the effects of backlash, friction, and flexibility of the actuation lines. A method for actuation compensation is presented in order to overcome uncertainties of modeling, friction, and backlash. This method uses a tiered hierarchy of two novel approaches of actuation compensation for remotely actuated snake-like robots. The tiered approach for actuation compensation uses compensation in both joint space and configuration space of the continuum robots. These hybrid actuation compensation schemes use intrinsic model information and external data through a recursive linear estimation algorithm and involve compensation using configuration space and joint space variables. Experimental results validate the ability of our integrated telemanipulation system through experiments of suturing and knot tying in confined spaces.

title: Intrinsic Wrench Estimation and Its Performance Index for Multisegment Continuum Robots
abstract: This paper presents the intrinsic capability of full-wrench estimation of multisegment continuum robots with multiple flexible backbones. Intrinsic-full-wrench estimation refers to the ability of continuum robots to also serve as force and moment sensors by using measurements of axial loads on their backbones. This end-effector-as-sensor approach fulfills the rapidly increasing needs for miniature-robotic-surgical tools with haptic sensing ability subject to various limitations, such as size, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatibility, sterilizability, etc. A performance index for the intrinsic wrench-sensing capability is introduced and evaluated to show how this index can serve as a design guide for continuum robots that provide force sensing.

title: Design, simulation and evaluation of kinematic alternatives for Insertable Robotic Effectors Platforms in Single Port Access Surgery
abstract: This paper presents the task specifications for designing a novel Insertable Robotic Effectors Platform (IREP) with integrated stereo vision and surgical intervention tools for Single Port Access Surgery (SPAS). This design provides a compact deployable mechanical architecture that may be inserted through a single Ø15 mm access port. Dexterous surgical intervention and stereo vision are achieved via the use of two snake-like continuum robots and two controllable CCD cameras. Simulations and dexterity evaluation of our proposed design are compared to several design alternatives with different kinematic arrangements. Results of these simulations show that dexterity is improved by using an independent revolute joint at the tip of a continuum robot instead of achieving distal rotation by transmission of rotation about the backbone of the continuum robot. Further, it is shown that designs with two robotic continuum robots as surgical arms have diminished dexterity if the bases of these arms are close to each other. This result justifies our design and points to ways of improving the performance of existing designs that use continuum robots as surgical arms.

title: Visual analysis of network centralities
abstract: Centrality analysis determines the importance of vertices in a network based on their connectivity within the network structure. It is a widely used technique to analyse network-structured data. A particularly important task is the comparison of different centrality measures within one network. We present three methods for the exploration and comparison of centrality measures within a network: 3D parallel coordinates orbit-based comparison and hierarchy-based comparison. There is a common underlying idea to all three methods: for each centrality measure the graph is copied and drawn in a separate 2D plane with vertex position dependent on centrality. These planes are then stacked into the third dimension so that the different centrality measures may be easily compared. Only the details of how centrality is mapped to vertex position are dierent in each method. For 3D parallel coordinates vertices are placed on vertical lines; for orbit-based comparison vertices are placed on concentric circles and for hierarchy-based comparison vertices are placed on horizontal lines. The second and third solutions make it particularly easy to track changing vertex-centrality values in the context of the underlying network structure. The usability of these methods is demonstrated on biological and social networks.

title: Visualization and analysis of email networks
abstract: This paper presents various methods for visualization and analysis of email networks; visualization on the surface of a sphere to reveal communication patterns between different groups, a hierarchical drawing displaying the centrality analysis of nodes to emphasize important nodes, a 2.5D visualization for temporal email networks to analyze the evolution of email relationships changing over time, and an ambient display for finding social circles derived from the email network. Each method was evaluated with various data sets from a research organization. We also extended our method for visual analysis of an email virus network.

title: Debugging object-oriented programs with behavior views
abstract: A complex software system may perform many program tasks during execution to provide the required functionalities. To detect and localize bugs related to the implementation of these tasks, the software developers must be able to monitor the progress of the tasks during execution and check whether the actions for these tasks have been performed correctly. This paper presents a debugger to facilitate this monitoring. The debugger introduces a new kind of abstraction, the behavior views, that can be used to specify how the actions for a program task are expected to occur in various scenarios. Enhanced with statements that can check properties at various steps during the progress of the task, a behavior view can be used to monitor whether the actions for the tasks have been performed at the right time, on the right set of data, and with the right effects on the program states. Our initial case study indicates that the debugger can be useful for localizing bugs.

title: Non-rigid Registration in 3D Implicit Vector Space
abstract: We present an implicit approach for pair-wise non-rigid registration of moving and deforming objects. Shapes of interest are implicitly embedded in the 3D implicit vector space. In this implicit embedding space, registration is performed using a global-to-local framework. Firstly, a non-linear optimization functional defined on the vector distance function is used to find the global alignment between shapes. Secondly, an incremental cubic B-spline free form deformation is used to recover the non-rigid transformation parameters. Local non-rigid registration is posed in terms of minimising an energy functional, for which we give a closed-form linear system and solve it using an improved iterative Gauss-Seidel method. Our approach can consistently produce smooth and continuous registration fields, and correctly establish dense one-to-one correspondences. It can naturally deal with both open partial and closed shapes, and imperfect models with gaps and noise, through its use of the implicit vector representation. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method.

title: Partial intrinsic reflectional symmetry of 3D shapes
abstract: While many 3D objects exhibit various forms of global symmetries, prominent intrinsic symmetries which exist only on parts of an object are also well recognized. Such partial symmetries are often seen as more natural than a global one, even when the symmetric parts are under complex pose. We introduce an algorithm to extract partial intrinsic reflectional symmetries (PIRS) of a 3D shape. Given a closed 2-manifold mesh, we develop a voting scheme to obtain an intrinsic reflectional symmetry axis (IRSA) transform, which is a scalar field over the mesh that accentuates prominent IRSAs of the shape. We then extract a set of explicit IRSA curves on the shape based on a refined measure of local reflectional symmetry support along a curve. The iterative refinement procedure combines IRSA-induced region growing and region-constrained symmetry support refinement to improve accuracy and address potential issues arising from rotational symmetries in the shape. We show how the extracted IRSA curves can be incorporated into a conventional mesh segmentation scheme so that the implied symmetry cues can be utilized to obtain more meaningful results. We also demonstrate the use of IRSA curves for symmetry-driven part repair.