Surgery for rectal cancer is required dense surgical operation in a narrow pelvis. Using robotic system for rectal surgery may facilitate more accurate and safe operations. However, in Japan robotic surgery is an early stage and have many problems. All of medical staff with the correct knowledge for the features of robotic system and skills for rectal surgery must be performed. In the future, the robotic surgery will be recognized as the best operations.

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Surgical robots have undergone considerable improvement by only mechanical performance in recent years, but the intuitive operability has not been quantitatively evaluated. This paper presents the brain activity measurement method to determine intuitive operability to design a robot with intuitive operability. The objective of this paper is to validate that the specific brain area which is the intraparietal sulcus activates if the user controls the slave manipulator positioned intuitively. In the experiments, while subjects controlled the hand controller to position the tip of the virtual slave manipulator on the target in the surgical simulator, we measured the brain activity through the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (f-NIRS). We carried out the experiment a number of times with the virtual slave manipulator configured in a variety of ways. The results show that the brain activated significantly with the specific slave manipulator configured such that the angles matched the human body. We conclude that the how strongly human feels the manipulator belongs to his body affects hand-eye coordination, which is related to visual and somatic sense feedback.

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In this report, reflected light which is a problem in the conventional transillumination method is explained, and a solution is proposed. The purpose of this report was to investigate the characteristics of transmitted and reflected light on the image of the recorded bite impression material, and to propose a method for distinguishing between the reflected light area and the occlusal contact area. Gray scale values in the transmitted and the reflected light areas were evaluated through the conventional transillumination method. The reflected light could not be distinguished from the contact area. From this result, it was revealed that the reflected light interfered with the observation of the occlusal contact via the conventional method. From the results of having evaluated RGB values in the transmitted and the reflected light areas, it was considered that the color difference between transmitted light and reflected light was useful to separate the transmitted and reflected light. Due to the adjustment of the offset and the gamma correction values, the reflected light could be distinguished from the occlusal contact area. It was considered that this method was helpful for accurately detecting the occlusal contact area on a digital photograph.

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