내시경 로봇의 기술동향

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 21st century, emergence of innovative technologies in robotic and telepresence surgery has revolutionized minimally access surgery and continually has advanced them till recent years. One of such surgeries is endoscopic surgery, in which endoscope and endoscopic instruments are inserted into the body through small incision or natural openings, surgical operations being carried out by a laparoscopic procedure. Due to a vast amount of developments in this technology, this review article describes only a technological state-of-the arts and trend of endoscopic robots, being further limited to the aspects of key components, their functional requirements and operational procedure in surgery. In particular, it first describes technological limitations in developments of key components and then focuses on the description of the performance required for their functions, which include position control, tracking, navigation, and manipulation of the flexible endoscope body and its end effector as well, and so on. In spite of these rapid developments in functional components, endoscopic surgical robots should be much smaller, less expensive, easier to operate, and should seamlessly integrate emerging technologies for their intelligent vision and dexterous hands not only from the points of the view of surgical, ergonomic but also from safety. We believe that in these respects a medical robotic technology related to endoscopic surgery continues to be revolutionized in the near future, sufficient enough to replace almost all kinds of current endoscopic surgery. This issue remains to be addressed elsewhere in some other review articles.