Robotic surgery: a review

Analysis and Comparison of Electromagnetic Microrobotic Platforms for Biomedical Applications

Magnetic microrobotics is a promising technology for improving minimally invasive surgery (MIS) with the ambition of enhancing patient care and comfort. The potential benefits include limited incisions, less hemorrhaging and postoperative pain, and faster recovery time. To achieve this, a key issue relies on the design of a proper electromagnetic actuation (EMA) setup which is based on the use of magnetic sources. The magnetic field and its gradient generated by the EMA platform is then used to induce magnetic torque and force for microrobot manipulations inside the human body. Like any control systems, the EMA system must be adapted to the given controlled microrobot and customized for the application. With great research efforts on magnetic manipulating of microrobots, the EMA systems are approaching commercial applications, and their configurations are becoming more suitable to be employed in real medical surgeries. However, most of the proposed designs have not followed any specific rule allowing to take into account the biomedical applications constraints. Through reviewing the different proposed EMA systems in the literature, their various specifications and configurations are comprehensively discussed and analyzed. This study focus on EMA platforms that use electromagnets. From this review and based on the biomedical application specifications, the appropriate EMA system can be determined efficiently.

Assessment of perceptual quality for gaze-contingent motion stabilization in robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery

With the increasing sophistication of surgical robots, the use of motion stabilisation for enhancing the performance of micro-surgical tasks is an actively pursued research topic. The use of mechanical stabilisation devices has certain advantages, in terms of both simplicity and consistency. The technique, however, can complicate the existing surgical workflow and interfere with an already crowded MIS operated cavity. With the advent of reliable vision-based real-time and in situ in vivo techniques on 3D-deformation recovery, current effort is being directed towards the use of optical based techniques for achieving adaptive motion stabilisation. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of virtual stabilization on foveal/parafoveal vision during robotic assisted MIS. Detailed psychovisual experiments have been performed. Results show that stabilisation of the whole visual field is not necessary and it is sufficient to perform accurate motion tracking and deformation compensation within a relatively small area that is directly under foveal vision. The results have also confirmed that under the current motion stabilisation regime, the deformation of the periphery does not affect the visual acuity and there is no indication of the deformation velocity of the periphery affecting foveal sensitivity. These findings are expected to have a direct implication on the future design of visual stabilisation methods for robotic assisted MIS.