抄録
Laparoscopic surgery brings many benefits for patients such as smaller scars, less pain, and shorter hospitalization compared with open surgery. Moreover recently, single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS), in which surgical instruments and a laparoscope are inserted into a single incision, provides more cosmetic benefits than the conventional laparoscopic surgery and has received a lot of attention as "scarless surgery" although it is more difficult to operate it than laparoscopic surgery. In order to overcome the difficulty of SILS, we developed a locally-operated master device and a flexible slave robot system, and confirmed the feasibility of the proposed system by conducting a basic task and an ex vivo cholecystectomy using a box trainer. As results of the experiments, we confirmed that our system provided surgeons shorter switching time, more stable operation, and fewer collisions than the conventional SILS. We also showed that the proposed system is available for single-port laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
