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A High-Precision and Miniature Fiber Bragg Grating-Based Force Sensor for Tissue Palpation During Minimally Invasive Surgery

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A Correction to this article was published on 21 November 2019

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG)-based palpation force sensor to explore tissue abnormalities during minimally invasive surgery. The proposed sensor design mainly consists of a miniature force-sensitive flexure, one tightly suspended optical fiber embedded with one FBG element and associated connectors and fixations. The flexure design has been prototyped through the configuration synthesis of Sarrus mechanism by using a rigid-body replacement method to achieve an excellent axial linear force–deformation relationship and a large measurement range. The mounted fiber has been configured at the flexure’s central line with its two ends glued, and its tight suspension configuration can achieve improved resolution and sensitivity and avoid the FBG chirping failure compared to the commonly used direct FBG-pasting methods. Finite element method (FEM)-based simulation has been performed to investigate both static and dynamic performance to aid in structural design. Simulation-enabled structural optimization design has also been implemented to further improve the proposed design and the sensor’s sensitivity has been increased. The optimized sensor design has been prototyped and calibrated to demonstrate an excellent linearity with a small linearity error of 0.97% and achieve a high resolution of 2.55 mN within a relatively large measurement range of 0–5 N. Dynamic force stimulation experiments, in vitro palpation implementation on a silicone phantom embedded with simulated tumors and ex vivo indentation experiments on a porcine liver have validated the effectiveness of the presented sensor design.

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  • 21 November 2019

    The second equation in the section “Definition of Objective Functions and Constraints” was corrected to fix a mismatch between the PDF and HTML versions of the article.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 51520105006, Grant 51721003 and Tianjin Natural Science Foundation under Grant 18JCYBJC41400.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Mechanism Theory and Equipment Design of Ministry of Education, School of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Changhu Lv, Shuxin Wang & Chaoyang Shi

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  1. Changhu Lv
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  2. Shuxin Wang
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Correspondence to Chaoyang Shi.

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Associate Editor Ka-Wai Kwok oversaw the review of this article.

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Lv, C., Wang, S. & Shi, C. A High-Precision and Miniature Fiber Bragg Grating-Based Force Sensor for Tissue Palpation During Minimally Invasive Surgery. Ann Biomed Eng 48, 669–681 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-019-02388-w

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