Keynote 

Abstract

Laparoscopic surgical robotics represents a major advance as it enables more complex and precise procedures, but its efficiency has been questioned in the context of hospital management. While with manual laparoscopic surgery four operations can be performed in one morning, with more than 8.000 robots installed worldwide the average of surgeries performed with robots per day last year was less than one. This means that although more efficacy is achieved with robot surgery, that is, more complex and precise surgeries are possible, it is less efficient. A reduction of the set-up time is thus a very important factor to achieve an acceptable cost per operation.

In the case of Bitrack, the robot designed at UPC and transferred to its spin-off, RobSurgicalSystems (RSS), a high efficiency has been achieved. This four-arm robot platform is endowed with free conventional trocars not attached to the robot and provided with redundancy automatic management. With its minimum number of redundant joints and automatically fixing the position of the joints according to the position of the trocars collisions are avoided during the intervention. In addition, the time required to change from manual to robot instruments and vice versa is less than one minute and the complete set-up time less than 15 minutes. In this way two arms can be moved apart enabling the surgeon to operate manually.

This scenario of a less invasive robot, operating with conventional trocars makes the concept of hybrid surgery possible, meaning that the robot can be used when required, not necessarily all along the intervention. In this case the surgery is not centered necessarily on the robot, meaning that in the phases of the intervention in which manual operation may be more efficient, the robot can be moved apart and be used again when needed. These performances have been verified along the on-going certification process.