Surgical telerobots improve surgeons' ability to see and manipulate objects in the surgical field, allowing them to accomplish the previously impossible, such as totally endoscopic coronary artery bypass surgery, and accelerating the adoption of difficult procedures such as totally endoscopic radical prostatectomies. Though the endoscopes used with surgical robots provide high-quality images, they have not evolved to take advantage of the shift to a robotic paradigm. Stereo endoscopes are so heavy that they require a special robot arm to hold them, and surgeons cannot freely exchange the endoscope from one port to another as they often do in conventional endoscopy. An endoscope that behaved like a robotic surgical tool, mountable on any robot instrument arm, with an articulated, steerable wrist, would fundamentally change robotic surgery, leading to major benefits for patients and surgeons. Surgeons could see around obstacles, operate over much wider areas inside the body without requiring a separate robot setup, and see the operating field from multiple perspectives. Anticipated benefits include reducing operative times, enabling new procedures, and improving functional outcomes for difficult surgeries like totally endoscopic multi-vessel coronary bypass and radical prostatectomy. The proposed technology would also lead to robot architecture changes that would dramatically improve ease-of-use and accelerate adoption of surgical robots. Phase I will include rapid prototyping of a steerable robotic endoscope that can be mounted on any instrument arm of the da Vinci surgical robot. Prototyping will enable clinical validation in a progressive series of eight dry lab and cadaver lab sessions, resulting in new choreographies for four representative cardiac and general surgery procedures and clear evidence of the benefits of a steerable robotic endoscope instrument.
Thesaurus Terms: biomedical equipment development, endoscopy, image guided surgery /therapy, robotics, surgery material /equipment bioimaging /biomedical imaging
