SPHERICAL MECHANISM DESIGN AND APPLICATION FOR ROBOT-ASSISTED SURGERY

Abstract

Robotic surgery is a surgical procedure that adds a computer-enhanced device to the interaction between surgeon and the patient during a surgical operation, assuming partial control of the operation normally completely reserved for the surgeon. Mechanism design is a critical element to ensure that the required degrees of motion for the application can be achieved. In this work, a double, circular, prismatic, parallel spherical mechanism is studied in depth and a general model of the mechanism is derived. Variants of the spherical mechanism are developed for multiple medical applications and the proposed mechanisms are utilized in our robot-assisted solutions to the medical problems. The applications include laser retinal surgery, percutaneous needle insertion for Radio Frequency Ablation (RFA) and laparoscopic surgical training. The results of this work demonstrates the feasibility of our prototype robot-assisted solutions which have been developed in close collaboration with clinicians.