Development of Hybrid System for Minimally Invasive Surgeries.

Abstract

Minimally Invasive Surgery(MIS), although advantageous compared to open cavity surgery in many aspects, is not widely accepted by surgeons for clinical application. This is due to cost and required complex training of the currently practiced technology. The main challenges in reducing cost and amount of training is to have an accurate inner body navigation advisory system along with the use of a flexible robot arm to safely perform such surgery. As a first step in making minimally invasive surgery affordable and easy to use, quality images inside the patient body as well as accurate position of the surgical tool should be provided in real time. An array of asynchronous sensors is required to successfully and safely perform real time inner body navigation. Furthermore, it is necessary to have flexible surgical arm capable of following curved paths to avoid damaging patient organs when moving the surgical tools inside the body. In this work, three asynchronous sensors are calibrated and information were fused together in real-time spatially and temporally in such a way that the fused information will be useful to perform successful MIS.  Furthermore, a complete design of the flexible surgical arm system is proposed. It is believed that the result of this work will have practical impacts on making MIS more affordable, and flexible surgical arms more accurate and user friendly than existing counterparts.