Design and research of a robotic system for ultrasonic‐assisted lamellar keratoplasty

Abstract

In order to solve the problem of uncontrollable cutting depth and the rough incision edge of the cornea with manual trephine in lamellar keratoplasty, an ultrasonic-assisted corneal trephination method has been proposed for the first time in accordance with the advantage of ultrasonic vibration cutting, and the corresponding robotic system has been designed and researched. According to the traditional process of lamellar keratoplasty, the requirements of the surgical robotic system were first proposed. On this basis, the robotic system was designed and its schematic diagram was introduced. Second, the key components of the robotic body such as the eccentric adjusting mechanism and the endeffector of ultrasonic scalpel were illustrated, which can realise corneal trephination of different incision diameters without scalpel replacement. Then the operation flow chart of a robot-assisted lamellar keratoplasty was put forward. Finally, the preliminary verified experiments were performed using a grape and a porcine eyeball, respectively, in vitro with the prototype system. The results show that the robotic system can basically satisfy the operation requirements of lamellar keratoplasty. Owing to the less cutting force and smoother corneal incision edge of ultrasonic-assisted lamellar keratoplasty compared with manual trephine, it was proved to be more feasible and superior.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

AIRS: Autonomous Intraoperative Robotic Suturing Based on Surgeon-Like Operation and Path Quantification in Keratoplasty

“…Shin et al [8] proposed a corneal suturing robot to control the suture shape, while how to tie a knot is not mentioned. Keratoplasty robots are also studied in [23] and [24]. However, the function of these robots is unitary and a whole interrupted suture could not be completed by one single robot.…”