A System for Beating Heart Surgery

In this project, an advanced robotic approach to perform TECAB on a beating heart with minimal invasiveness is proposed. The idea comes from the fact that the main pulsations of the heart occur as excursions in normal direction, i.e., perpendicular to the heart surface. We devise a 1-DOF flexible heart stabilizer which eliminates the lateral movements of the heart, and a 1-DOF compensator mechanism which follows the heart trajectory in the normal direction, thus canceling the relative motion between the surgical tool and the heart surface. A motion sensor mounted on the stabilizer measures the heart excursion data and sends it into a control unit. A predictive controller uses this data to generate an automated trajectory. The slave robots follow this trajectory, which is superimposed on the surgeon’s tele-operation commands received from a master console. Finally, the tool actuator units in the slave robots actuate the articulated laparoscopic tools to perform the anastomosis procedure.

Publications:

• Alamdar A, Hanife S, Farahmand F, Behzadipour S, Mirbagheri A. A minimally invasive robotic surgery approach to perform totally endoscopic coronary artery bypass on beating hearts. Medical hypotheses. 2019.

• Alamdar A, Kaveh H, Ghasemi A, Houshmand A, Farahmand F, Mirbagheri A, A hybrid heart compensation/stabilization approach for beating heart surgery: Proof of concept. in preparation