Linan Zhang, Shuxin Wang, PhD. Tianjin University
Objective: Most commercial surgical robotic system is complex, bulky, heavy, expensive and not portable. Many researchers design a hand-held laparoscopic instrument to replace the bulky commercial surgical robotic system. Although some designs are small, light and have low cost. However, most designs are not ergonomic, the operations are not intuitive, and the designer is not consider about the whole surgical system which including instrument and endoscope system at least.
Our goal was to offer a simple surgery scheme by using a portable hand-held robotic system, which contains a hand-held manipulator and an endoscopic-monitor. Robotic surgery will be very small and low cost and can be easily performed in some special place, such as battlefield, aircraft, and home and in some emergency situation anywhere.
Technology: We have designed a portable hand-held robotic surgical system. Robot instrument of MicroHand S system designed in our lab can be installed on this system. Three joints of the instrument, pitch, end rotation, and open and close are moto-drived and controlled by a hand interface. The hand interface have three joints which can be comfortably manipulated by surgeon. To achieve intuitive manipulation, the instrument can be rotated by hand. The the initial orientation of the forceps in the video can be adjusted according the orientation of hand interface. A 7 inch monitor is fixed on an endoscope which can directly show the surgical vision. The endoscope is support by an arm connected with bed and don’t need nurse to hold anymore. Some robotic features such as scale motion, tremor filtering and some other safety control strategies are also considered in this system.
Preliminary results: Several subjects including 2 surgeons with and 5 without surgical robotic experience was tested to use this system to do surgical operation on a laparoscopic surgical training phantom. And swine experiment is doing recently. Surgeons with or without surgical robotic experience have different overview to this system. And it seems there are many controversy about this system.
Conclusions: Portable Hand-Held Robotic Surgical System can increase the dexterity, intuitive feeling of the surgical operation. The whole system may have its own market in the future application.