Abstract
Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is one of the main aims of modern medicine. It enables surgery to be performed with a lower number and severity of incisions. Medical robots have been developed worldwide to offer a robotic alternative to traditional medical procedures. New approaches aimed at a substantial decrease of visible scars have been explored, such as Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES). Simple surgical tasks such as the retraction of an organ can be a challenge when performed from narrow access ports. For this reason, there is a continuous need to develop new robotic tools for performing dedicated tasks. This article illustrates the design and testing of a new robotic tool for retraction tasks under vision assistance for NOTES. The retraction robots integrate brushless motors to enable additional degrees of freedom to that provided by magnetic anchoring, thus improving the dexterity of the overall platform. The retraction robot can be easily controlled to reach the target organ and apply a retraction force of up to 1.53 N. Additional degrees of freedom can be used for smooth manipulation and grasping of the organ.
Highlights
Surgical procedures have advanced over the past years and many solutions have been proposed with the aim of reducing the invasiveness of current medical techniques [1]
Other more compact robots have been developed for approaching traditional laparoscopy with a robot, but they still have the major limitation of requiring the same number of incisions as in traditional laparoscopy [3,4,5]
The concept we propose is based on modular robotic units aiming to provide current Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES) with smaller and less complicated devices capable of performing basic surgical tasks on relatively small operating areas
Summary
Surgical procedures have advanced over the past years and many solutions have been proposed with the aim of reducing the invasiveness of current medical techniques [1]. Laparoscopy is currently considered the MIS technique par excellence, and is performed using long instruments that are introduced in the abdomen through dedicated accesses. Laparoscopy requires high skills, due to the intrinsic technical limitations that result in the loss of hand-eye coordination and reduced dexterity. Robotic surgery has been introduced in the clinical practice to make difficult surgical tasks (i.e., suturing tasks) easier for the surgeon, recovering hand-eye coordination and dexterity. The same number of incisions (i.e., the same level of invasiveness) is required for a robotic laparoscopic surgery and a surgery performed in traditional laparoscopy. Other more compact robots have been developed for approaching traditional laparoscopy with a robot, but they still have the major limitation of requiring the same number of incisions as in traditional laparoscopy [3,4,5]
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