Autonomous anastomosis is a complex soft-tissue surgery procedure. This necessitates surgical planning procedures, tissue tracking, and complex imaging. Furthermore, highly adaptive control strategies are employed in unstructured and deformable environments to attain perfect execution. Such systems are considered more difficult in the laparoscopic setting because of the need for excellent dexterity and reproducibility under motion and vision limits.
A recent study has proposed an autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for small bowel anastomosis. This self-contained robotic surgery system could revolutionize the
Surgical Robots Market as it can be consistent, safe, and improve efficiency.
To begin, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot provides the improved autonomy required for this operation. The operator merely needs to choose from a list of suggested suture schemes and watch the robot to see if a stitch must be repeated.
In addition, the increased autonomous strategy's laparoscopic implementation is created. Advanced control techniques, computer vision, and machine learning are applied to follow the target tissue movement. This is done in response to patient breathing, detect tissue deformations between distinct suturing phases, and run the robot under motion limits.
Experiments reveal that the proposed system can equal expert surgeons' performance while also exhibiting a high level of consistency.
Researchers showed robotic laparoscopic small bowel anastomosis in phantom. Further, they also demonstrated it in vivo intestinal tissues and presented an improved autonomous technique for laparoscopic soft tissue surgery. This improved autonomous approach allows the operator to choose from a variety of autonomously created surgical plans, and the robot performs a wide range of activities on its own.
The researchers contrasted RAS (Robot-Assisted Surgery), manual laparoscopic surgery, and a self-driving system. They were evaluated based on anastomosis quality parameters such as completion time, leak pressure, needle positioning adjustments, suture bite-size, lumen patency, and suture spacing. The mission was completed with a one-week survival period. They then used the technology to perform in vivo autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery on porcine models for intestinal anastomosis.
In terms of consistency and precision, data from a phantom model shows that the system beats expert surgeons' manual approach and RAS technique. In the in-vivo model, this was also confirmed.
These findings show that high-autonomy surgical robots can improve consistency, patient outcomes, and access to a conventional surgical method.