A Review of Pneumatic Actuators Used for the Design of Medical Simulators and Medical Tools

Abstract

Simulators have been traditionally used for centuries during medical gestures training. Nowadays, mechatronic technologies have opened the way to more evolved solutions enabling objective assessment and dedicated pedagogic scenarios. Trainees can now practice in virtual environments representing various kind of patient and body parts including physio-pathologies issues. Gestures, to be mastered, vary according to each medical specialty (e.g., ultrasound probe orientations, or forceps installation during assisted delivery). Hence, medical students need kinesthetic feedback in order to significantly improve their learning capabilities. Gesture simulators require haptic devices with variable stiffness actuators. Existing solutions do not always fit the requirements because of their significant size. Contrary to electric actuators, pneumatic technology is low-cost, available off-the-shelf and offers a better mass–power ratio. However, it presents two main drawbacks: nonlinear dynamics and need for a compressed air supply. During the last decade, we have developed several haptic solutions based on pneumatic actuation (e.g., birth simulator, epidural needle insertion simulator) and, recently, in a joint venture with Prisme laboratory, a pneumatic probe master device for remote ultrasonography. This paper recalls literature scientific approaches on pneumatic actuation developed in the medical context and illustrated with the aforementioned applications to highlight the benefits.

Remote Ultrasound Scan Procedures with Medical Robots: Towards New Perspectives between Medicine and Engineering

“…According to this idea, the physician should use an artificial body [30] with a probe emulating the use of the sonograph on the real patient's body. The ideal condition would be the use of an artificial body that, by means of distributed actuators, creates feedback that the operator can feel as a tactile force [31]. The main issue is that there is currently no artificial body on the market that meets these requirements.…”

“…The fact that the physicians are distant from the patients implies that they are not able to directly feel the body reaction, something that is required even for highly skilled medical personnel. To improve the [24] Pressure control High weight Abdomen Kim et al [25] Force feedback Limited force Thyroid Abolhassani et al [26] Trajectory planning Slow velocity Prostate therapy Li et al [27] Trajectory planning Lack of in vivo testing Lumbar puncture Böttger et al [28] Dexterity and kinematics Simulations only Microcirculation Filippeschi et al [29] User interface including navigation Remote conditions simulated only Abdomen Sénac et al [31] Review of pneumatic actuators control No in vivo testing Neonatal procedures Gilbertson et al [32] Force and position control Soft tissues Muscular systems Kaminski et al [33] Force feedback Feasibility study Thyroid diseases Bucolo et al [34] Force feedback Prototype only Abdomen Hadjikov et al [35] Model-based control Simulations only Abdominal fascia Applied Bionics and Biomechanics capability to compensate for the separation between the operator and the patient, the interface with the medical robot must be enhanced. The use of a haptic device to control the robot through an intelligent probe scaling the forces to allow a more ergonomic holding position was evaluated in [11].…”

Recent Advances in Smart Epidural Spinal Needles

“…This is quite understandable as there is no real-time monitoring of the needle position [7,8]. As for epidural space localization, scientists have proposed various methodologies based on mechanical and optical schemes for the identification of the needle position, as will be explained in detail in this paper [2,[9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

Analysis of Pneumatic Systems Using the Laplace Equation Based on Python Programing

“…The pneumatic system is a system that involves gas flow (Ren et al 2019). Pneumatic pressure is one among the vital variables used in industries like power plants (Al-Dhaifallah et al 2018), automotive and aircraft (Nehler 2018), chemical reaction control (Leszcynski et al 2019), bioengineering (Ren et al 2018), food (Makiyama et al 2020), medical (Sénac et al 2019), position servo systems (Mu et al 2019), well drilling (Leiden et al 2023), electronic (Walker et al 2020), heating (Fang et al 2018), ventilating (Krasteva et al 2018), air conditioning systems (Merzvinskas et al 2020), automobile [Sun et al 2021), and so on. The use of pneumatic systems that have been widely applied in industry is not impossible to be applied to other fields where the control devices are combined with other systems.…”