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Tiny Robotic Wrist Gives New Dexterity to Needlescopic Surgery

With the flick of a tiny mechanical wrist, engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt University hope to give needlescopic surgery a whole new degree of dexterity. The tiny incisions needlescopic surgery requires are so small that they can be sealed with surgical tape and usually heal without leaving a scar. The researchers developed a surgical robot with steerable needles equipped with wrists that are less than 2 mm thick. The new device is designed to provide needlescopic tools with a degree of dexterity that they have previously lacked. Not only will this allow surgeon-operators to perform a number of procedures such as precise resections and suturing that haven't been possible before, but it will also allow the use of needles in places that have been beyond its reach, such as the nose, throat, ears, and brain.

Topics:
Automation Medical Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music] we basically take a very small tube that's the size of a needle and we cut little notches in the tip and we run one wire down the inside of the tube and we pull on the tube and that makes the tip Bend what it does is it gives the surgeon a little bit of ability to turn a corner at the end of the tool so just like the human wrist lets me bend my

    00:00:28 hand over this wrist will let the surgeon inside the patient bend a little surgical tool to the side to do things like tie a knot with when he's stitching up an organ um or just uh dissect something pull something out no one else has come up with this because it's just outside the normal way you think about these things we knew it was a a game changer so we think it can work in a lot

    00:00:54 of different kinds of surgeries really throughout the body so what we want to see happen is something called needle scopic surgery the first one we're going after is transnasal brain surgery so we're actually putting the instruments through the nose and up into the brain and removing tumors um and the great thing about this is you don't need a part of your skull removed to get at the

    00:01:14 the tumor just go through the nose and there's no visible scar patient can go home very quickly uh recovery is much much better it will be useful for a lot of other things uh tumors in the neck for example in the throat um in even in the abdomen if you want to tie the you know the uers back on to the kidney you could use something like this so we just think once we give this tool to the

    00:01:35 doctors they're going to find all kinds of applications we haven't even thought of for it the next step is assembling it onto the concentric tubes um and getting all the software working so that the doctor can remote control it so that will probably be done by the end of this summer is our goal the next step after that is actually we need a commercial

    00:01:57 partner so we have to commercialize the device it has to go through the FDA process and then it can be used in the initial patient trials so I would say the the best case scenario would probably be about uh four years five years [Music]