Surgical Applications of Compliant Mechanisms: A Review

Abstract

Current surgical devices are mostly rigid and are made of stiff materials, even though their predominant use is on soft and wet tissues. With the emergence of compliant mechanisms (CMs), surgical tools can be designed to be flexible and made using soft materials. CMs offer many advantages such as monolithic fabrication, high precision, no wear, no friction, and no need for lubrication. It is therefore beneficial to consolidate the developments in this field and point to challenges ahead. With this objective, in this article, we review the application of CMs to surgical interventions. The scope of the review covers five aspects that are important in the development of surgical devices: (i) conceptual design and synthesis, (ii) analysis, (iii) materials, (iv) manufacturing, and (v) actuation. Furthermore, the surgical applications of CMs are assessed by classification into five major groups, namely, (i) grasping and cutting, (ii) reachability and steerability, (iii) transmission, (iv) sensing, and (v) implants and deployable devices. The scope and prospects of surgical devices using CMs are also discussed.

A Fully 3D-Printed Steerable Instrument for Minimally Invasive Surgery

“…A comprehensive overview of 3D-printed surgical instruments has been published previously by our group [17]. AM allows for the possibility of using different approaches, such as non-assembly 3D-printed mechanisms [18,19] or 3D-printed compliant solutions [20], which already have been successfully applied in prosthetics [21] and surgical forceps [22]. In addition, AM enables the production of personalized items at no extra cost [23,24].…”

Visual servoing of continuum robots: Methods, challenges, and prospects

“…Since the first introduction of CRs, their broad functionality and effectiveness in many applications have been proved by the number of active researchers worldwide and the growing number of scientific articles published to date. Therefore, several review papers have been published in the last two decades on the foundations of continuum robotics, 3 concentric‐tube CRs, 4 snake‐like CRs, 5–7 bio‐inspired soft robots, 8,9 design and modelling of CRs, 10,11 control of CRs, 12,13 and CRs in medical applications 1,14–23 . This repository of reviews provides valuable resources to the current and future continuum robotics researchers; however, to the best of our knowledge, no survey has been published on the control of CRs based on visual feedback provided by various imaging modalities.…”

“…Therefore, several review papers have been published in the last two decades on the foundations of continuum robotics, 3 concentric-tube CRs, 4 snake-like CRs, [5][6][7] bio-inspired soft robots, 8,9 design and modelling of CRs, 10,11 control of CRs, 12,13 and CRs in medical applications. 1,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] This repository of reviews provides valuable resources to the current and future continuum robotics researchers; however, to the best of our knowledge, no survey has been published on the control of CRs based on visual feedback provided by various imaging modalities.…”

Integrated Development of a Topology-Optimized Compliant Mechanism for Precise Positioning

“…This offers increased precision and reliability combined with reduced wear, eliminating the need for lubrication. Such systems are often designed with certain aims, not only at the macro-scale, such as large-input displacement amplification [7] or sufficiently high output stiffness [8,9], but also at the micro-scale, such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) [10] and surgical applications [11]. As design problems become more complicated, the continuum topology optimization (TO) freeform design methodology has also become a popular routine for such mechanisms [4,[12][13][14][15][16].…”