Functional colonoscope robot system

Colonoscopy is an important medical procedure for the diagnosis of various diseases, such as cancers in the colon and rectum. However, it requires a lot of time for a doctor to acquire dexterous skills necessary to perform successful colonoscopy. Moreover, for many patients, conventional colonoscopy simply takes long time. Therefore, some studies on the development of autonomous and more convenient colonoscopes are carried out. In this paper, we propose a functional colonoscope robot system that has a locomotive function with a hollow body, a steering system, and other basic functions of typical conventional colonoscope systems. The concept and each component of the functional colonoscope system are described in this paper. In order to evaluate the functional performance of the colonoscope robot, we carried out in-vitro and in-vivo tests.