Vitreoretinal surgery pertains to the treatment of delicate tissues on the fundus of the eye using thin instruments. Surgeons frequently rotate the eye during surgery, which is called orbital manipulation, to observe regions around the fundus without moving the patient. In this paper, we propose the autonomous orbital manipulation of the eye in robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery with our tele-operated surgical system. In a simulation study, we preliminarily investigated the increase in the manipulability of our system using orbital manipulation. Furthermore, we demonstrated the feasibility of our method in experiments with a physical robot and a realistic eye model, showing an increase in the view-able area of the fundus when compared to a conventional technique. Source code and minimal example available at https://github.com/mmmarinho/icra2023_orbitalmanipulation.

翻译：玻璃体视网膜手术使用精细器械处理眼底脆弱组织。手术中，外科医生常通过转动眼球（称为眼球转动操作）来观察眼底各区域，而无需移动患者。本文提出在机器人辅助玻璃体视网膜手术中，利用我们的遥操作手术系统实现自主眼球转动操作。在仿真研究中，我们初步探究了眼球转动操作对系统可操作性的提升。此外，通过实体机器实验和逼真眼模型验证了我们方法的可行性，结果表明与传统技术相比，该方法增加了眼底可视区域。源代码及最小示例见 https://github.com/mmmarinho/icra2023_orbitalmanipulation。