Page 183 - Control Theory in Biomedical Engineering

168 Control theory in biomedical engineering

(Gourdon et al., 1999a,b), Salcudean System (Salcudean et al., 1999), Hip-
pocrate (Pierrot et al., 1999), and others (Masuda et al., 2001), are very useful
diagnostic tools because they are noninvasive, generally nonexpensive, and
use highly portable methods that do not use ionizing radiation. However,
generating and interpreting ultrasound images are highly operator-
dependent. As a result, performance and interpretation of these examinations
have traditionally been limited to medical specialists (Ferreira et al., 2015).
In 2003, ZEUS was discontinued, following the merger of Computer
Motion with its rivalIntuitive Surgical, maker of the da Vinci Surgical Sys-
tem described previously. The da Vinci system was the first surgical system to
address adequately all laparoscopic surgery’s previous problems. This is due
to the reduction of the range of motion, 3D imaging, and the surgical arm
unit that positions and maneuvers detachable surgical instruments. The main
technological advantages of this system are stereovision, dexterity, realistic
3D imaging, motion-scaling, and tremor filtration. Since then, more precise
and accurate endoscopic surgery is guaranteed (Bodner et al., 2005). Such
telepresence surgery overcomes two main problems of classical laparoscopic
surgery, i.e., the limitation to only four degrees of freedom and the lack of
stereovision (Rassweiler et al., 2001). Since then, the da Vinci System has
been used in many surgical procedureswhere the first intervention was a lap-
aroscopic radical prostatectomy (Abbou et al., 2001). Other applications in
laparoscopic tele-surgery soon followed.
Since 2004, the field of surgical robotics is marked by a new generation of
small patient-mounted robots (Walsh et al., 2008) and surgical robots for
dedicated applications (Morgia and De Renzis, 2009; Barrett et al.,
2007), transluminal endoscopy interventions as flexible endoscopy
(Dogangil et al., 2010) and intra-body continuum robots (Burgner-Kahrs
et al., 2015; Runciman et al., 2019). A review of emerging surgical robotic
technology is described in Peters et al. (2018). Several applications of the
new generation of medical robots will be described in the following section.
The relatively short history of surgical robotics can be then depicted in three
stages as described by Fig. 12.

5.2 Applications

Robotic MIS has undergone a profound revolution in the past 35 years. MIS
is performed by introducing two to three long and rigid tools into the
patient’s abdomen through small incisions (about 10–15mm in diameter)
for endoscopic vision. For single-port laparoscopic surgery, surgeons create