Robot arm tracks heartbeat to give surgeons a steady hand
Robot arm tracks heartbeat to give surgeons a steady hand
Keywords: Healthcare, Robots
A robot arm and monitoring system that can help surgeons perform open-heart surgery have been developed by a research team from the University of Tokyo. The robot arm holds the scalpel, the forceps and other instruments, and the surgeon him/herself controls the movement using a remote-control system while viewing the entire surgical field in a mirror.
Performing coronary bypasses and other operations on a beating heart are difficult tasks because the target field is always moving. The new robot system,however, simplifies the task by making it appear to the surgeons that the heart is motionless.
Two high-speed cameras take pictures of the heart at a rate of 955 frames per second and these pictures are then processed by a computer so that the heart as viewed on the monitor looks as if it is not moving. The robot arm tracks the movement of the beating heart, adjusting the position of the medical instrument accordingly, though this movement is not seen by the surgeon on the monitor.
To the operating surgeons it appears as if they are controlling the movement of a steady robot arm over a still heart.
