Design and evaluation of a modular robotic system for microsurgery

The manipulation of instruments under a microscope suffers from physiological tremor and human errors, which are inevitable in long microsurgery interventions. Robotic systems developed in recent years for microsurgery are expensive and not flexible, as they cannot use standard instruments, and need the surgeon to modify their operative skills and strategies. In this paper, we introduce a modular robotic system for microsurgery enabling the surgeon to operate using conventional instruments. Our system was implemented using a commercial Kinova robot and a dedicated modular end-effector that uses standard microsurgery instruments. An initial teleoperation validation was carried out by eleven participants, who could successfully control the microsurgery tools to perform basic surgical movements. Furthermore, participants performed a simple anastomosis task with the robot and compared it to manual control. The results showed that robotic control is superior to manual control in simple surgical tasks and the converse in complex tasks. Participants preferred the proposed robotic system due to its user-friendliness and effort reduction.