Tele-operation master-slave system for minimal invasive brain surgery

The minimal invasive surgery reducing an incision is required for a tumor resection in the field of neurosurgery. The minimal invasive surgery has many advantages of operations which are less lost of blood and painless using a thin long pole shape surgical instrument. For all those advantages, it has defects of difficulties of visual insurance and limitations of moving surgical instruments. Therefore, many researchers are developing several manipulators which are capable of minimal invasive surgery using robot technologies to solve these problems recently. However, most developed surgery robots for minimal invasive surgery are limited to the operation of laparoscopic surgery. In this study, we developed a tele-operational master-slave system for the minimal invasive brain surgery. The master manipulator has 4 degree of freedom (DOF) mechanism for the manipulation of slave position and direction. Similarly, the slave end-effector for the minimal invasive brain surgery has a thin long pole shape of 4DOF instrument. The master manipulator and slave end-effector have a similar configuration and 4DOF mechanism which consists of a linear motion and 3 rotational roll-pitch-yaw motions. Therefore, the position command matching between the two systems is very easy. In addition, the master and slave control systems are connected with TCP/IP based Internet communication for the tele-operation surgery. Finally, various experimental results are executed to evaluate the performances of the proposed tele-operation master-slave system.