Coronary heart disease is a leading cause of death in the USA. A promising treatment option for this disease is off-pump coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery as the artery grafting is done without stopping the heart. In the robotic assisted-surgery concept the surgeon views the surgical scene on a video display and operates on the heart as if it were stationary while the robotic system actively compensates for the motion of the heart. With the proposed system concept, the CABG surgery will be possible without using passive stabilizers, and the hospitalization time and cost of the operation will be decreased.
In this dissertation intelligent robotic tools for assisting off-pump (beating heart) CABG surgery are presented. Most important aspects of such a robotic system are accurately measuring and predicting the heart motion as they are instrumental in canceling the relative motion between the heart surface and surgical tools attached to the robotic manipulators. The proposed control algorithm contributes to the field by using biological signals in the estimation of heart's future motion for active relative motion canceling. Also a novel contact position sensor is developed to measure the position of the beating heart and a preliminary noise characterization for the future sensor system implementation is presented.