Medical Electronics
Applying DDS to medical robots for minimally invasive microsurgery
F
or Medical robotics, device developers need to meet complex and rigorous design requirements. RTI and the open connectivity standard DDS help to meet those challenges, expediting time to market while reducing development and maintenance costs. Medical robotics is now becoming a
reality. Medical professionals use robots for everything from surgery and rehabilitation, to noninvasive general hospital and pharmacy applications. The medical robotics market has increased almost sevenfold since 2012 and the market is predicted to an annual growth of over 20 per cent through 2022, largely driven by medical robots for minimally invasive surgery, which represent roughly 70 per cent of the market.
Design challenges for medical robots 70 per cent of medical robotics applications are surgical in nature and contain some of the most difficult design challenges. In a medical robotic application, many subsystems need to communicate and interoperate. Some of these subsystems need to be accurate down to a very tight specification. Further, when these modules are put together, the entire system must function with this same level of accuracy. The ability to achieve this system-wide accuracy depends on how the subsystems communicate. High-resolution cameras are the eyes of the surgeon. The higher image resolution, the more likely it is that the surgeon can identify disease states and improve surgical precision. At the same time, these high- resolution cameras are pushing the envelope for latency and throughput requirements. As the robotic system connects to other devices and to clinical information and enterprise systems, it is at greater risk for security breaches, putting patient data and potentially patient lives at risk. To address
this, the application must meet or exceed current regulatory requirements.
The lack of interoperability in medical systems costs upwards of 30 billion USD annually. A modular system requires an architectural approach to communication and connectivity that allows for scalability and provides a ready-to- grow foundation for connecting to the enterprise and overall healthcare IoT system. In this application, it is required to connect the robotic surgical device to other medical devices used in the procedure, such as infusion pumps and patient monitors. In addition to the security, designers want to be able to connect to other systems in a plug- and-play manner. Having all of these devices communicate can reduce some of the costs associated with a lack of interoperability. Product scalability is the ability to design new components for the medical robot and add them seamlessly – meaning that the new subsystem is easily discoverable by the rest of the system.
Solving design, delivery and cost challenges with DDS A data-centric communication architecture is based on a software databus. Think of the software databus as a shared application space where all of the data lives. It is an excellent tool for distributing and managing real-time data. It is what allows these applications and devices to work together as one integrated system. DDS is an open connectivity middleware
standard specifically designed to handle complex, mission-critical, distributed computing applications. The DDS specification provides the technical requirements and defines the software databus. DDS has been adopted by several technical and industry groups including the
Figure 3: Three MIRO Lab robots coordinated through RTI Connext DDS software (image courtesy of DLR).
Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), AutoSAR and ROS2. Another way to think about DDS is as a data everywhere abstraction (Figure 1). The subsystems of medical robots have data that they need to send. In the standard, each data piece is called a topic. Each topic can be individually tuned for attributes like Quality of Service (QoS) and security settings. Devices in the system can then subscribe to that data. There are devices that continuously publish data at a certain rate and there are devices that can subscribe to that data. The result is that all of the devices in this shared global data space get the data they need, when they need it.
DDS technology defines the software databus The DDS standard includes a plug-in security architecture that connects to the DDS library. It is customisable via any standard API and runs over any transport and provides complete protection. DDS is a peer-to-peer architecture that works without a message broker. The standard was designed for applications that absolutely depend on low latency. With DDS, developers can shape network traffic by balancing throughput for different types of data. This allows the system to use bandwidth more efficiently. For example, traffic can be limited to only necessary or critical data using data filtering and QoS. And the data is distributed across the system. Essentially, DDS creates building blocks that make it easy to build redundant systems and paths with failover anywhere in the system. The DDS standard wire protocol
Figure 1: DDS is a data distribution system that enables a “data everywhere” abstraction. 18 October 2019 Components in Electronics
provides syntactic interoperability, which provides a common communication protocol across subsystems. In combination with a consistent data model, which provides semantic interoperability, there is the foundation for a plug-and-play modular architecture. This allows system architects to move forward with a modular
design that is key to these complex medical robotics systems. There can be data exchange between the devices across different programming languages without any application-level effort, significantly reducing the lines of code at the application level. The software databus decouples
software, providing data anywhere, over any network and any transport. The decoupled subsystems work independently, and data-centric sharing enables them to function as one system. That same decoupling makes it easy to add future components to the medical device. A software databus also makes it easier to integrate the device into other IIoT devices and enterprise systems (Figure 2).
A case study RTI worked with the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics DLR to develop MiroSurge (Figure 3). This device pushes the limits of minimally invasive robotic surgery technology by using a robotic device to enable a surgeon to operate on a beating heart. In order for a surgeon to do this, the heart cannot look like it is beating. This means the robotic surgical device needs to move in sync with the beating heart so the heart appears to be still throughout the surgery. This is absolutely revolutionary technology in minimally invasive surgery and the use of robotics. RTI Connext DDS provides the communications infrastructure between the three MIRO robots, the endoscope, the surgeon’s robot controllers, and the surgeon’s and technician’s user interfaces, facilitating synchronization and coordination between them. The availability of RTI Connext Micro also means that systems can be developed today with an understanding of the medical certification route in the future. DDS is the key enabling technology that provides the real-time connectivity for highstakes medical robotics.
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