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, Kaveh H, Ghasemi A, Farahmand F, Behzadipour S, Mirbagheri A. A one DOF stabilizer/compensator robotic system for beating heart surgery. in preparation

• Alamdar A, Kaveh H, Ghasemi A, Farahmand F, Behzadipour S, Mirbagheri A. Design and development of a compensator unit for accurate tracking of a beating heart 2019  in preparation 

My contribution to this project can be divided into three parts