A paper which addresses the lack of appropriate feedback to surgeons when teleoperating robot surgical systems such as the da vinci.
"tactile" = relating to the sense of touch.
See: https://www.quora.com/Robotics-What-is-the-difference-between-tactile-feedback-and-haptic-feedback
Main contribution:
Displaying suture strain in real time has potential to decrease the learning curve and improve the performance and safety of robotic surgical procedures. Conventional strain measurement methods involve installation of complex sensors on the robotic instruments. This paper presents a noninvasive video processing-based method to determine strain in surgical sutures. The method accurately calculates strain in suture by processing video from the existing surgical camera, making implementation uncomplicated.
I see, a video-based (or vision-based, I guess) system for providing additional feedback to the surgeon. Similar to the "Sensory Substitution" paper from (Okamura et al, 2005). But no Deep Learning. Note: the da vinci, they claim, has no force feedback, which would explain the research literature here in the first place!
Part of the motivation for doing this is because it is important to maintain tension during suturing (as, again, I know) and this is not easily done by simply looking at videos/images, some additional feedback is helpful, which is what this paper addresses.
They cite the "Sensor Substitution" paper [6] as follows:
It has been demonstrated that haptic feedback via visual and auditory cues does decrease the time to perform suture tying with robotic systems [6].
But rather than install complicated systems, they propose a non-invasive video-based solution. Good! Well it depends on a lot of assumptions and is quite hand-tuned, so unclear how this can generalize.