Toward Automation of Looping in Robot Assisted Pediatric Thoracoscopic Surgery―Study of Robotic Suture Looping with Multi-DOF Surgical Tools―

抄録

A semi-automated approach for looping in pediatric thoracoscopic surgery was previously introduced that utilized a surgical system with straight surgical tools. To achieve automation of looping in pediatric thoracoscopic surgery, a high level of dexterity in surgical tools is necessary. This paper models the flexible link in a multi-degrees-of-freedom (multi-DOF) compliant surgical tool. An experiment was carried out to validate the modeling of the flexible link and assess the effectiveness of the multi-DOF surgical tools compared to the straight surgical tools in performing suture looping tasks for a simulated pediatric thoracoscopic surgery. The findings demonstrate that the use of multi-DOF surgical tools resulted in reduced task completion time and decreased user workload when performing suture looping tasks for simulated pediatric thoracoscopic surgery.