Giving New Agility to Needlescopic Surgery with a Tiny Mechanical Wrist

Giving New Agility to Needlescopic Surgery with a Tiny Mechanical Wrist

By Shinji Tutoru

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, Tennessee, USA. A tiny mechanical wrist is providing a new level of dexterity to needlescopic surgery. This kind of surgery utilizes surgical instruments that are customized with the diameter of a sewing needle. Its needle-sized incisions are so small that there is no need for surgical tape to seal them and the incisions heal naturally with no traces of scars. The tiny robotic claw can immensely increase accuracy in highly delicate surgeries.

A team of engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt University’s Medical Engineering and Discovery Laboratory wanted to improve the current needlescopic surgery method. It was headed by associate professor of mechanical engineering Robert Webster. They developed a surgical robot that has steerable needles that are equipped with wrists that are less than 1/16th of an inch thick.

This new device provides needlescopic tools with a degree of agility and flexibility that are lacking in the current procedure. It will allow surgeon-operators to perform precise suturing and resections that were not possible before. It will also enable them to use the needles in hard to reach places like the nose, ears, throat and brain.

When instruments are smaller, patients experience less post-operative pain and they have faster recovery. This is why when surgical instruments are made smaller they maintain a certain degree of dexterity that is very advantageous to the surgical procedure.

The team’s surgical robot that uses steerable needles has a system of telescoping tubes that are made of a memory metal that can retain its shape. Each nitinol tube has a unique curvature. An operator can meticulously extend, retract and rotate the tubes and can even steer the tip in different directions, thus, providing it a curving path all throughout the body.

The overall design allows the needles to operate in hard to reach areas of the body that even the da Vinci robot or manual endoscopic instruments cannot reach. The inclusion of wrists to the steerable needles tremendously expands the instrument’s usefulness. It has great potential in endoscopic neurosurgery and even operating within small lumens like the ear or urethra as well as in surgeries that require much larger incisions and other operations that are not currently possible.

Invention Giving New Agility to Needlescopic Surgery with a Tiny Mechanical Wrist
Organization Vanderbilt University
Researcher Robert Webster & Team
Field(s) Minimally Invasive Surgery, Needlescopic Surgery, Endoscopy, Medical Engineering, Surgical Robots, Medical Robotics
Further Information http://factor-tech.com/health-augmentation/18978-tiny-robotic-claw-will-help-medics-perform-brain-surgery/

Image courtesy of pixabay.com

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