Eye gaze tracking can enable numerous exciting applications in robotic surgery such as hands-free instrument control, skill assessment, and cooperative surgical procedures. However, existing methods in gaze estimation either rely on complex hardware installations on the surgeon console or are sensitive to head movements post calibration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of wearable eye tracking glasses on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). With a stereo calibration procedure and head tracking technology, we quantify gaze estimation error and decalibration events, such as head movement and glasses slippage. We show that these are significant sources of error in wearable gaze tracking technology. Future work includes compensating for these decalibration events for robust eye tracking in robotic surgery.
Büter, R., Han, J. J., Acar, A., Li, Y., Puentes, P. R., Soberanis-Mukul, R. D., Gupta, I., Bhowmick, J., Ghazi, A., Maier, A., Unberath, M., & Wu, J. Y. (Accepted/In press). Improving the Temporal Accuracy of Eye Gaze Tracking for the da Vinci Surgical System through Automatic Detection of Decalibration Events and Recalibration. Journal of Medical Robotics Research, Article 2440001. https://doi.org/10.1142/S2424905X24400014
Soberanis-Mukul, R.D., Puentes, P.R., Acar, A. et al. Cognitive load in tele-robotic surgery: a comparison of eye tracker designs. Int J CARS (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-024-03150-x
Regine Büter, Roger D. Soberanis-Mukul, Paola Ruiz Puentes, Ahmed Ghazi, Jie Ying Wu, and Mathias Unberath “Eye tracking for tele-robotic surgery: a comparative evaluation of head-worn solutions”, Proc. SPIE 12928, Medical Imaging 2024: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling, 129281Y (29 March 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3006476
Ruiz Puentes P, Soberanis-Mukul RD, Acar A, Gupta I, Bhowmick J, Li Y, Ghazi A, Kazanzides P, Ying Wu J, Unberath M. Pupillometry in telerobotic surgery: A comparative evaluation of algorithms for cognitive effort estimation. Med Robot. 2023;1. doi:10.54844/mr.2023.0420