Multidisciplinary Approach for Developing a New Minimally Invasive Surgical Robotic System

The synergy between fundamental science, engineering and medicine is constantly evolving while providing physicians with better tools and techniques for delivering patients effective health care. Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) revolutionized the way in which a number of surgical procedures are performed resulting in quicker postoperative recovery times. Surgical robotics provides a new paradigm to further improve MIS interventions. As part of an extensive experimental protocol, the kinematics and the dynamics of MIS tools were acquired from 30 surgeons who performed seven different minimally invasive surgical tasks. These tasks included tissue manipulation, tissue dissection and suturing in-vivo while using the Blue Dragon system and a porcine model. This database served as a design specification for a kinematic optimization of a spherical surgical robotic manipulator. Following the optimization that determined key geometrical dimensions of the robot, a 7-DOF cable-actuated surgical manipulator was designed and integrated, providing all the degrees of freedom of manual MIS as well as wrist joints located at the surgical end-effector. The surgical robotic system is teleoperated utilizing a single bi-directional UDP socket via a remote master device. This multidisciplinary approach of designing and optimizing the surgical robotic system will lead to a seamless integration into the operating room of the future