GRASP Special Seminar – David Noonan, Imperial College London, London, UK, “A Flexible Mechatronic Device for Minimally Invasive Surgery – Design for Access, Imaging and Diagnostic Sensing”

Abstract: Advances in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) are driven by the clinical
demand to reduce the invasiveness of surgical procedures so patients
undergo less trauma and experience faster recoveries. This talk will
introduce a new seven degree-of-freedom mechatronic instrument which is
capable of providing controlled flexibility along curved pathways
inside the body and hence reduce the number of incisions required when
performing complex in-vivo explorations and interventions. The
principal component of the device is its novel modular mechatronic
joint design which utilises an embedded micromotor-tendon actuation
scheme to provide independently addressable degrees of freedom and
three internal working channels. The design is optimized to have a
minimum footprint within the operating theatre yet provide enhanced
functionalities over existing MIS compatible flexible instrumentation.
The talk will describe how the redundancy of the instrument’s seven
degrees of freedom can be exploited to explore the entire peritoneal
cavity from a single incision point, and how it can provide a stable
base for the deployment of interventional instruments and optical
imaging probes during in-vivo porcine experiments. In addition to these
pre-clinical translational studies, two experimental techniques for
improving the device functionality will be described. The first aims to
improve the consistency of images acquired using optical imaging probes
deployed through the device, while the second explores the possibility
of controlling the device in a ‘hand’s free’ manner by using the
operator’s gaze fixation point as feedback to close the servo control
loop.