MiDAS: A Multimodal Data Acquisition System and Dataset for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

2026-02-12

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Machine Learning: Multimodal Learning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-modal RAG
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments

Abstract

Background: Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) research increasingly relies on multimodal data, yet access to proprietary robot telemetry remains a major barrier. We introduce MiDAS, an open-source, platform-agnostic system enabling time-synchronized, non-invasive multimodal data acquisition across surgical robotic platforms. Methods: MiDAS integrates electromagnetic and RGB-D hand tracking, foot pedal sensing, and surgical video capturing without requiring proprietary robot interfaces. We validated MiDAS on the open-source Raven-II and the clinical da Vinci Xi by collecting multimodal datasets of peg transfer and hernia repair suturing tasks performed by surgical residents. Correlation analysis and downstream gesture recognition experiments were conducted. Results: External hand and foot sensing closely approximated internal robot kinematics and non-invasive motion signals achieved gesture recognition performance comparable to proprietary telemetry. Conclusion: MiDAS enables reproducible multimodal RMIS data collection and is released with annotated datasets, including the first multimodal dataset capturing hernia repair suturing on high-fidelity simulation models.

Problem

• robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery
• multimodal data acquisition
• proprietary robot telemetry
• data accessibility
• surgical robotics

Innovation

• multimodal data acquisition
• robot-assisted surgery
• non-invasive sensing
• open-source system
• surgical gesture recognition