  Anatomical structures are rarely static during a surgical procedure due to
breathing, heartbeats, and peristaltic movements. Inspired by observing an
expert surgeon, we propose an intermittent synchronization with the extrema of
the rhythmic motion (i.e., the lowest velocity windows). We performed 2
experiments: (1) pattern cutting, and (2) debridement. In (1), we found that
the intermittent synchronization approach, while 1.8x slower than tracking
motion, was significantly more robust to noise and control latency, and it
reduced the max cutting error by 2.6x In (2), a baseline approach with no
synchronization achieves 62% success rate for each removal, while intermittent
synchronization achieves 80%.
