Tiny mechanical wrist gives new dexterity to needlescopic surgery
With the flick of a tiny mechanical wrist, a team of engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt University’s Medical Engineering and Discovery Laboratory hope to give needlescopic surgery a whole new degree of dexterity.
Needlescopic surgery, which uses surgical instruments shrunk to the diameter of a sewing needle, is the ultimate form of minimally invasive surgery. The needle-sized incisions it requires are so small that they can be sealed with surgical tape and usually heal without leaving a scar.
Research team headed by Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Robert Webster has developed a surgical robot with steerable needles equipped with wrists that are less than 1/16th of an inch (2 mm) thick. The achievement is described in a paper titled “A wrist for needle-sized surgical robots” presented in May at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Seattle.
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