A Tactile Magnification Instrument for Minimally Invasive Surgery

The MicroTactus is a family of instruments that we have designed to detect signals arising from the interaction of a tip with soft or hard objects and to magnify them for haptic and auditory reproduction. We constructed an enhanced arthroscopic surgical probe and tested it in detecting surface defects of a cartilage-like material. Elastomeric samples were cut at different depths and mixed with blank samples. Subjects were asked to detect the cuts under four conditions: no amplification, with haptic feedback, with sound feedback, and with passive touch. We found that both haptic and auditory feedback significantly improved detection performance, which demonstrated that an enhanced arthroscopic probe provided useful information for the detection of small cuts in tissue-like materials.