• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.172-178
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• 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has been reshaping the world by accelerating non-contact services and technologies in various domains. Hospitals as a healthcare system lie at the center of the dramatic change because of their fundamental roles: medical diagnosis and treatments. Leading experts in health, science, and technologies have predicted that robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) can drive such a hospital transformation. Accordingly, several government-led projects have been developed and started toward smarter hospitals, where robots and AI replace or support healthcare personnel, particularly in the diagnosis and non-surgical treatment procedures. This article inspects the remaining element of healthcare services, i.e., surgical treatment, focusing on evaluating whether or not currently available laparoscopic surgical robotic systems are sufficiently preparing for the era of post-COVID-19 when contactless is the new normal. Challenges and future directions towards an effective, fully non-contact surgery are identified and summarized, including remote surgery assistance, domain-expansion of robotic surgery, and seamless integration with smart operating rooms, followed by emphasis on robot tranining for surgical staff.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.225-230
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• 2014

The increased application of the da Vinci robotic platform (Intuitive Surgical Inc.) for microsurgery has led to the development of new adjunctive surgical instrumentation. In microsurgery, the robotic platform can provide high definition $12{\times}-15{\times}$ digital magnification, broader range of motion, fine instrument handling with decreased tremor, reduced surgeon fatigue, and improved surgical productivity. This paper presents novel adjunctive tools that provide enhanced optical magnification, micro-Doppler sensing of vessels down to a 1-mm size, vein mapping capabilities, hydro-dissection, micro-ablation technology (with minimal thermal spread-$CO_2$ laser technology), and confocal microscopy to provide imaging at a cellular level. Microsurgical outcomes from the use of these tools in the management of patients with infertility and chronic groin and testicular pain are reviewed. All these instruments have been adapted for the robotic console and enhance the robot-assisted microsurgery experience. As the popularity of robot-assisted microsurgery grows, so will its breadth of instrumentation.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.8-15
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• 2022

In this paper, we proposed the method of virtual reality-based surgical navigation to reproduce the pre-planned position and angle of the pedicle screw in spinal fusion surgery. The goal of the proposed method is to quantitatively save the surgical plan by applying a virtual guide coordinate system and reproduce it in the surgical process through virtual reality. In the surgical planning step, the insertion position and angle of the pedicle screw are planned and stored based on the virtual guide coordinate system. To implement the virtual reality-based surgical navigation, a vision tracking system is applied to set the patient coordinate system and paired point-based patient-to-image registration is performed. In the surgical navigation step, the surgical plan is reproduced by quantitatively visualizing the pre-planned insertion position and angle of the pedicle screw using a virtual guide coordinate system. We conducted phantom experiment to verify the error between the surgical plan and the surgical navigation, the experimental result showed that target registration error was average 1.47 ± 0.64 mm when using the proposed method. We believe that our method can be used to accurately reproduce a pre-established surgical plan in spinal fusion surgery.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.301-308
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• 2020

In this paper, we deal with the static modeling of a continuum robot that can perform surgical interventions. The proposed continuum robot is made of stainless steel wires and a multi lumen flexible tube using a thermoplastic elastomer. This continuum robot could be most severely deformed in physical contact with narrow external environments, when a lateral external force acts at the distal tip of the continuum robot. In order to predict the shape and displacement under the lateral external force loading, the forward kinematics, the statics modeling, the force-moment equilibrium equation, and the virtual work-energy method of the continuum robot are described. The deflection displacements were calculated using the virtual work-energy method, and the results were compared with the displacement obtained by the conventional cantilever beam theories. In conclusion, the proposed static modeling and the virtual work-energy method can be used in arrhythmia procedure simulations.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.788-794
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• 2002

To improve surgical result of total hip arthroplasty (THA), there has been some approaches using a robotic milling system, which can make a precise cavity in the femur. Usually, to carve a femur, the surgical robot is controlled by a pre-programmed tool-path regardless of a surgeon's experience and Judgment. This paper presents a control method of a surgical robot for THA, which can be used as an advanced surgical tool. With a master/slave combined surgical robot, surgeon can directly control the motion and velocity of a surgical robot. The master/slave-combined robot is controlled to display a specific admittance for a surgeon's force to the surgical robot velocity. To prevent the over-carving of a femur, virtual hard wall is displayed on the surgical boundary. To evaluate the proposed control method of the master/slave-combined surgical robot, 2-DOF master/slave-combined manipulator is used in experiment.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.203-210
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• 2019

This paper proposes a hand-controller mechanism for manually controlled endoscopic surgical instruments. A wire-driven mechanism is typically adapted for endoscopic surgical tools because motors cannot be embedded to the joints due to the size limitation. The wire-driven mechanism requires length control of wires that are pulled and released according to the desired joint angle. It is difficult for the operator to control individual wire lengths intuitively. The hand-controller mechanism should be able to control the wires easily without complex processes. For this purpose, we propose a mechanism that can control the wire lengths with a simple mechanical structure and its optimal design method using genetic algorithm. We show the simulation and experimental results to confirm the proposed mechanism and design methods are useful for the manually controlled endoscopic surgical instrument.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.164-171
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• 2021

This paper proposes a continuum mechanism for manually controlled endoscopic surgical instruments. The wire-driven mechanism is typically adapted for endoscopic surgical tools because motors cannot be embedded to the joints due to the size limitation. However, the conventional wire-driven mechanism has inherent problems caused by redundancy, such as deflection and low precision. It does not have operating force and manipulability for surgery. Therefore, a method to increase the force of the continuum mechanism using a multi-wire with simple mechanical structure is proposed. Moreover, for intuitive operation, a hand-controller mechanism that can manipulate the length of the wire without complex process is proposed. Finally, we show that the proposed mechanism and methods are applicable to endoscopic surgical tools through simple experiments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.579-584
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• 2016

When surgical instruments are tracked in an image-guided surgical navigation system, a stereo vision system with high accuracy is generally used, which is called optical tracker. However, this optical tracker has the disadvantage that a line-of-sight between the tracker and surgical instrument must be maintained. Therefore, to complement the disadvantage of optical tracking systems, an internal vision sensor is attached to a surgical instrument in this paper. Monitoring the target marker pattern attached on patient with this vision sensor, this surgical instrument is possible to be tracked even when the line-of-sight of the optical tracker is occluded. To verify the system's effectiveness, a series of basic experiments is carried out. Lastly, an integration experiment is conducted. The experimental results show that rotational error is bounded to max $1.32^{\circ}$ and mean $0.35^{\circ}$, and translation error is in max 1.72mm and mean 0.58mm. Finally, it is confirmed that the proposed tool tracking method using an internal vision sensor is useful and effective to overcome the occlusion problem of the optical tracker.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.840-845
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• 2010

This paper proposes the method indirectly measuring the operating force of the end-effect tip of surgical robot instrument which conducts the surgical operation in the body on behalf of the surgeon's hand. Due to the size and safety obligation to the surgical robot instrument, it is difficult to measure the operation force of its tip like grasping force. However the instrument is driven by cable-pulley torque transmission mechanism and when some force is occurred at the tip, then the reaction force appears on the cable as additional tension. Based on this phenomenon, this paper proposes a method to estimate the operating force from measuring reaction force against the driving motor by using a loadcell. And it induces mathematical equation to calculate the force from loadcell by approaching the modulus of elasticity to high order polynomial. And this paper proves the validity of proposed mechanism by experimental test.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.20-28
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• 2012

In spite of the difficulties and uncertain characteristic of cable driven method, surgical robot instrument has adopted it as driving mechanism for various reasons. To overcome the problem of cable system, previous research applied SMCSPO (sliding mode control with sliding perturbation observer) algorithm as robust controller to control the instrument and found that the value of SPO (sliding perturbation observer) followed force disturbance, reaction force loaded on the tip very similarly. Thus, this paper confirms that the perturbation observer is sufficient estimator which finds out the mount of loaded force on the surgical robot instrument. To prove the proposition, simulation using the similar model with an actual instrument and experimental evaluation are performed. The results show that it is possible to substitute SPO for sensors to measure the reaction force. This estimated reaction force will be used to realize haptic function by sending the reaction force to a master device for a surgeon. The results will contribute to create surgical benefit such as shortening the practice time of a surgeon and giving haptic information to surgeon by using it as haptic signal to protect an organ by making force boundary.