At Techno Frontier 2010, The University of Tokyo's Mitsuishi-Sugita Laboratory exhibited a "micro-surgery support system for neurosurgery."
"Today, we're doing a demo that simulates bypass surgery on a blood vessel in the brain. This operation is to reconnect a blocked blood vessel near the brain's surface. We've installed an artificial blood vessel, 1mm wide, and in this demo, we're suturing it."
Vascular bypass operations require micrometer precision. That makes them difficult even for veteran surgeons. In this system, a slave manipulator is operated from a master manipulator, using a robot to achieve high-precision surgery.
"The human hand inevitably shakes to some extent. That's called "tremor," and suturing narrow blood vessels is difficult because tremor is inevitable. The main advantage of this system is, it enables surgery without tremor. This is achieved by controlling the robot's motion with a precision of 10 microns."
The surgery is filmed with a 3D camera, and the surgeon manipulates the slave unit via the master unit while looking at a 3D monitor.
The slave consists of a surgery robot and forceps, with three degrees of freedom for translation, three for attitude, and one for gripping. In experiments, it's been possible to suture an artificial blood vessel 0.25 mm wide in five minutes. The time lag in control is less than 100 microseconds, so the position determination is precise enough for microsurgery.
From now on, the researchers aim to make this system even safer and easier to use, with a view to clinical trials.
Related Links :
-
The Univ. of Tokyo NML lab.-
Techno-Frontier 2010
