Towards robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery: Force-sensing micro-forceps integrated with a handheld micromanipulator
In vitreoretinal practice, controlled tremor-free motion and limitation of applied forces to the retina are two highly desired features. This study addresses both requirements with a new integrated system: a force-sensing motorized micro-forceps combined with an active tremorcanceling handheld micromanipulator, known as Micron. The micro-forceps is a 20 Ga instrument that is mechanically decoupled from its handle and senses the transverse forces at its tip with an accuracy of 0.3 mN. Membrane peeling trials on a bandage phantom revealed a 60–95% reduction in the 2–20 Hz band in both the tip force and position spectra, while peeling forces remained below the set safety threshold.
This paper describes an on-line method for building e-insensitive support vector machines for regression as described in [12]. The method is an extension of the method developed by [1] for building incremental support vector machines for classification. Machines obtained by using this approach are equivalent to the ones obtained by applying exact methods like quadratic programming, but they are obtained more quickly and allow the incremental addition of new points, removal of existing points and update of target values for existing data. This development opens the application of SVM regression to areas such as on-line prediction of temporal series or generalization of value functions in reinforcement learning.