Development of a precise Laparoscopy Grasper

Minimal invasive surgery (MIS) are too small incision surgery as compared to open surgery. Generally, simple surgery or open surgery have longer recovery time due to the large size of wound whereas in MIS four to five small incision are made and doctors operate through these holes using laparoscopic tools. Due to MIS, the wound sizes decreased to about 10 -15 mm from 100 mm and so the recovery time of the patient is reduced. (Mirbagheri and Farahmand 2010)

In clinical practice, both robotic laparoscopic surgery and manual hand-held laparoscopic surgery are in use. In a hand-held laparoscopic surgery, the doctor uses Laparoscopes and insert it through the incision in the skin and operates on the tissue. Laparoscopes play a vital role in MIS, it acts as doctor's hand inside the patient body and provides remote access to the doctors. The ability of a doctor to perform complex surgery is significantly enhanced due to the precision and accuracy of laparoscopic tools. One of the limiting issues in the laparoscopic surgery is the lack of tactile sense to the surgeon. Insufficient force propagated to the jaw tip (point of action) may cause tissue slippage while excessive force may lead to tissue rupture. In current tools, the surgeon has to rely solely on visual feedback as the tactile feel of ‘slipping’ is not transmitted back to the surgeon.

Investigating the ability of surgeons. (Putten, et al. 2010) , it is suggested that 38% of the cases had unintentional slippage of the tissue and 16% had some tissue rupture. So in total about 54% of the cases had a deficiency in grasping. There is a need for augmented feedback to get the tactile feedback to the surgeon.

In this paper, we look at manufacturing tolerances that resulting in the fade-off in tactile sensation of handling the tissue to the surgeon. Specifically the role of friction and joint clearances resulting in the loss of feedback and establishing the force bandwidth of the tactile sensation available to the surgeon while manipulating the tissue. Multibody simulation has been used to traverse a range of parameter values to estimate the response to force input at the jaw end while the gross motion of the grasping system is being carried out