Magnetic Anchored and Cable Driven Endoscope for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Globally, the minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been applied to more and more medical fields. MIS can provide many benefits for the patient, such as reduced pain, faster recovery, and better cosmesis [1]. But it also causes many challenges to the doctor and assistant during the long surgery. The most prominent problem is how to get the desired view through the narrow incision and the current solution is to insert a rigid endoscope into the surgical cavity of the patient. But this method will also bring about many problems and magnify the difficulty of the surgery. Firstly, the motion of the endoscope is limited by the incision especially when sharing the same port with other instruments, leading to the insufficient field of view (FOV) during the surgery. Also, the frequent collisions between the endoscope and other instruments will also interfere the adjustment of FOV. To address the above issues, the magnetic anchored and guided system (MAGS) is proposed [2]. Due to there is no rigid shaft and the endoscope is attached on the inner wall of the surgical cavity, the problems of port-crowing and instrument-fencing can be significantly alleviated, as shown in Fig.1. But how to arrange and control additional degrees of freedom (DOF) on MAGS to make it can cover the full FOV for surgeon is still a challenging problem. Here, we introduce the cable-driven mechanism to combine with the magnetic actuation method, providing a feasible solution for clinical application.