Development of an Automatic Endoscope Positioning System based on Biological Fluctuation

—A Non-model based Algorithm for Automatic Positioning of an Endoscope—

Abstract

In general endoscopic surgery, the surgeon operates instruments and the camera assistant operates an endoscope. Because of shortage of physicians, there are demands for transition to endoscopic solo surgery. For the purpose of this demand, the automatic endoscope positioning system which operates the endoscope instead of the camera assistant during surgery has been actively researched from home and abroad. Almost research of automatic endoscope positioning system has tried to make a model of camera assistant's endoscopic operation. However, there is no system which has enough performance as compared with the camera assistant. The difficulty of making an accurate model of camera assistant's endoscopic operation is the most significant factor. We propose a bio-inspired automatic endoscope positioning algorithm which is a nonmodel based approach and develop a system which was implemented the proposed algorithm. We assess the surgeon's procedure through gallbladder removal simulations using the automatic endoscope positioning system. We compare an algorithm which has been seen in previously research with the proposed algorithm. We validate the effectivity of the proposed method as compared with the surgeon's procedure.