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.