Development of instruments for laparoscopic single-site surgery

Development of instruments for laparoscopic single-site surgery

In laparoscopic surgery, the abdominal cavity of the patient is opened through a small incision. In the created access a laparoscope is inserted to illuminate and optically detect the internal organs and indicate it to the surgeon by an appropriate visual representation. In single-site surgery beside the laparoscope at least two other instruments for tissue manipulation are inserted through the same opening into the abdominal cavity. Where such access is located in the navel, the scar is barely visible later. However, besides the resulting good cosmetic result, the single-port laparoscopy has the advantages of a low blood loss and a short recovery time. To expand the applications for this new surgical technique medical systems are needed. This should in particular have a high mobility of the end-effector in a large collision-free workspace.

At the imes, a single-port system with intervention optimal kinematics and dimensioning is to be synthesized. For this purpose the following methods and criteria are used: To evaluate and quantitatively compare the quality of different systems a target workspace as required by the procedure is defined. In a development environment, the kinematics of the single-port system is modeled using universal tools. With this, the executable workspace is calculated. The executable workspace is that part of the target workspace, which can be achieved with a given single-port system and is thus a quantitative characteristic of the quality of a system. Since collisions between mobile and immobile elements of the system and the environment have a major influence in single port surgery, these are included in the workspace calculation. Using the executable workspace as a quality criterion, the dimensioning of the single-port systems are optimized for the needs of an intervention.