Design and Performance Investigation of a Robot-Assisted Flexible Ureteroscopy System

Abstract

Flexible ureteroscopy (FURS) has been developed and has become a preferred routine procedure for both diagnosis and treatment of kidney stones and other renal diseases inside the urinary tract. The traditional manual FURS procedure is highly skill-demanding and easily brings about physical fatigue and burnout for surgeons. The improper operational ergonomics and fragile instruments also hinder its further development and patient safety enhancement. A robotic system is presented in this paper to assist the FURS procedure. The system with a master-slave configuration is designed based on the requirement analysis in manual operation. A joint-to-joint mapping strategy and several control strategies are built to realize intuitive and safe operations. Both phantom and animal experiments validate that the robot has significant advantages over manual operations, including the easy-to-use manner, reduced intraoperative time, and improved surgical ergonomics. The proposed robotic system can solve the major drawbacks of manual FURS. The test results demonstrate that the robot has great potential for clinical applications.

A Robotic System for Solo Surgery in Flexible Ureterorenoscopy

“…An assistance mechanism with two rubber wheels at the entrance to the UAS guides the shaft of the FU. The system is controlled via two coupled joysticks with three actuated DoFs [28].…”

Robotic flexible ureteroscopy: A new challenge in endourology

“…Zhao et al [ 4 ] introduced their prototype of a robotic flexible ureteroscopic system with a mechanical background. They reported amazing data from phantom and animal experiments which may validate that the robot has significant advantages over manual operations, including ease of use, reduced intraoperative time, and improved surgical ergonomics.…”

Safety enhanced surgical robot for flexible ureteroscopy based on force feedback

“…[9][10][11] This robot meets most of the requirements of FURS: it can manipulate the commercial flexible ureteroscopes and laser fibres, and is also equipped with an irrigation system. 12 Later, Zhao and colleagues 13 also developed a similar robotic system to improve the ergonomics of FURS.…”