Robot Assisted Stapedotomy with an Active Handheld Instrument
Abstract:
Robotic-assisted surgery is a rapid growing field, facing challenging tasks and
demands from surgeons, in particular in minimally invasive and microsurgery.
However many of the present robotic systems are not well integrated in the
surgical workflow, too big or too expensive. Micron is an innovative fully
handheld active micromanipulator that helps surgeons to improve position
accuracy and precision in microsurgery by cancelling the normal hand tremor.
This thesis proposes an improvement and development of Micron, considering
as target the stapedotomy procedure, microsurgery performed at the middle ear
that aims to restore the hearing impairments. Two tools, a handle and a brace
were designed and prototyped and the control was adapted; at the end the entire
system was assessed through some experiments. Promising results were
obtained in terms of tremor cancellation but further research is needed in order
to reach clear advantages.
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