“Surgery recorder system” for recording position and force of forceps during laparoscopic surgery

A unique concept of the total recording method to improve safeness during the minimally invasive surgery (MIS) was proposed. MIS has been increasing the number of clinical cases with wide spread of public interest in rapid recovery from surgical diseases. Then the risk of clinical accidents will also be raised for a reason that shortage in supply of standard clinical treatments will lead to complications or mortal cases associated with misjudgments of surgeons. Actually, specific accidents in MIS have been increasing, but there is no efficient methodology of quantitative analysis for accidents, even the standard format for surgical record including operative procedure. We therefore developed the surgery recorder system (Surgery Recorder in short), which gives clinical review process an objective way of identifying the causes of accidents. The concept of Surgery Recorder is based on the " flight recorder with voice / video recorder in the operating theater. Surgery Recorder records surgery information including position/orientation (P/O) and force/torque (F/T) signals of surgical tools, an endoscopic vision and surrounding sounds as well as vital data of the patient in the operating theater (A/V information). A prototype of laparoscopic forceps (SF-Mark II) for P/O and F/T sensing was also developed with less stress of the sensor weight at surgical operation. Then, two types of pig experiments in vivo by an expert were performed for investigating the rough forceps motion to diaphragm and liver. The data from SF-Mark II is useful for detecting the forceps force/motion information of the tissue damage and the simultaneous verification of the A/V information is very important to verify the surgeon\´s intention level. The ability of Surgery Recorder for quantitative postoperative analysis was introduced by two types of pig experiments.