30-03-2011, 04:07 PM
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APPLICATIONS OF ROBOTICS IN MEDICINE
Abstract
Robots in medicine deserve enhanced attention, being a field where their instrumental ids enable exacting options. The availability of oriented effectors, capable to get into the human body with no or negligible impact, is challenge, evolving while micro-mechanics aims at nanotechnology. The survey addresses sets of known achievements, singling out noteworthy autonomous in body devices, either co-robotic surgical aids, in view of recognizing shared benefits or hindrances, to explore how to conceive effective tools, tailored to answer given demands, while remaining within established technologies.
Robotics for medical applications started fifteen years ago while for biological applications it is rather new (about five years old). Robotic surgery can accomplish what doctors cannot because of precision and repeatability of robotic systems. Besides, robots are able to operate in a contained space inside the human body. All these make robots especially suitable for non-invasive or minimally invasive surgery and for better outcomes of surgery. Today, robots have been demonstrated or routinely used for heart, brain, and spinal cord, throat, and knee surgeries at many hospitals in the United States (International Journal of Emerging Medical Technologies, 2005).
Nanorobotics is the still largely hypothetical technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a nanometer(10-9meters). Also known as nanobots or nanites, they would be constructed from nanoscale or molecular components. So far, researchers have only been able to produce some parts of such a machine, such as bearings, sensors, and synthetic molecular motors, but they hope to be able to create entire robots as small as viruses or bacteria, which could perform tasks on a tiny scale. Possible applications include micro surgery (on the level of individual cells), utility fog, manufacturing, weaponry and cleaning. This presentation provides a survey of current developments, in the spirit of focusing the trends toward the said turn.
Introduction
Robotics is a field that has many exciting potential applications. It is also a field in which expectations of the public often do not match current realities. Truly incredible capabilities are being sought and demonstrated in research laboratories around the world. However, it is very difficult to build a mechanical device (e.g., a robotic arm) that has dexterity comparable to a human’s limbs. It is even more difficult to build a computer system that can perceive its environment, reason about the environment and the task at hand, and control a robotic arm with anything remotely approaching the capabilities of a human being.
History of robotics
The word robot (from the Czech word robota meaning compulsory labor) was defined by the Robotic Institute of America as “a machine in the form of a human being that performs the mechanical functions of a human being but lacks sensitivity.” One of the first robots developed was by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495; a mechanical armored knight that was used to amuse royalty. This was then followed by creation of the first operational robot by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, in which an automated loom, controlled by punch cards, created a reproducible pattern woven into cloth. Issac Asimov further elucidated the role of robotics in 1940 through short stories; however, it was his three laws of robotics that received popular acclaim. The three laws state1) A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm2)A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with First Law and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law
Applications in Medicine
Robots are filling an increasingly important role of enhancing patient safety in the hurried pace of clinics and hospitals where attention to details and where reliability are essential. In recent years, robots are moving closer to patient care, compared with their previous role as providing services in the infrastructure of medicine. Examples of past use are in repetitive activities of cleaning floors and washing equipment and carrying hot meals to patients’ bedside. What is new is finding them in clinical laboratories identifying and measuring blood and other specimen for testing, and in pharmacies counting pills and delivering them to nurses on ‘med-surg-units’ or ICU’s. Or bringing banked blood from the laboratory to the ED, surgery, or ICU for transfusions. Robots are being used as very accurate ‘go-fors’!
An early active robot, ‘Robodoc’ was designed to mill perfectly round lumens in the shafts of fractured bones, to improve the bonding of metal replacements such as for femur heads, and knee joints. The future of this system remains uncertain because of questions about the ultimate beneficial outcomes.
The reasons behind the interest in the adoption of medical robots are multitudinous. Robots provide industry with something that is, to them, more valuable than even the most dedicated and hard-working employee - namely speed, accuracy, repeatability, reliability, and cost-efficiency. A robotic aid, for example, one that holds a viewing instrument for a surgeon, will not become fatigued, for however long it is used. It will position the instrument accurately with no tremor, and it will be able to perform just as well on the 100th occasion as it did on the first.
Robotic surgery
Robotic surgery is the process whereby a robot actually carries out a surgical procedure under the control of nothing other than its computer program. Although a surgeon almost certainly will be involved in the planning of the procedure to be performed and will also observe the implementation of that plan, the execution of the plan will not be accomplished by them - but by the robot.
In order to look at the different issues involved in the robotic fulfillment of an operation, the separate sections of a typical robotic surgery (although robotic surgery is far from typical) are explained below.
Surgical planning
Surgical planning consists of three main parts. These are imaging the patient, creating a satisfactory three-dimensional (3D) model of the imaging data, and planning/rehearsing the operation. The imaging of the patient may be accomplished via various means. The main method is that of computer tomography (CT). CT is the process whereby a stack
Of cross-sectional views of the patient are taken using magnetic-resonance-imaging or x-ray methods. This kind of imaging is necessary for all types of operative procedure and, as such, does not differ from traditional surgical techniques.
A patient having a brain scan
This two-dimensional (2D) data must then be converted into a 3D model of the patient (or, more usually, of the area of interest). The reasons for this transformation are twofold. Firstly, the 2D data, by its very nature, is lacking in information. The patient is, obviously, a 3D object and, as such, occupies a spatial volume. Secondly, it is more accurate and intuitive for a surgeon, when planning a procedure, to view the data in the form that it actually exists. It should be noted, however, that the speed of said hardware is increasing all the time and the price will decrease too, as the technology involved becomes more commonplace. This means that the process will be more cost-efficient and increasingly routine in the future.
The third phase of the planning is the actual development of the plan itself. This involves determining the movements and forces of the robot in a process called ‘path planning’ - literally planning the paths that the robot will follow.
A surgery simulation to aid planning
It is here that the 3D patient model comes into play, as it is where all the measurements and paths are taken from. This emphasizes the importance of the accuracy of the model, as any errors will be interpreted as absolute fact by the surgeons (and hence the robot) in their determination of the plan.
Registration of robot to patient
The registration of the robot and the patient is the correlation of the robot’s data about the patient with the actual patient, in terms of positioning. There are two important stages in the registration procedure - fixation of the patient and the robot, and intra-surgical registration itself. Fixation is an essential ingredient of a successful robotic operation. Robots act upon pre-programmed paths , these programs are much more complex if they must take into account the fact that the patient’s position may be different to the inputted data and, in fact, continually changing. For this reason it is imperative that the robot can act in, at least, a semi-ordered environment.
Fixation of the patient that is fixing the patient in position (i.e. on the operating table), is achieved through strapping and clamping of the areas pertinent to the surgery. This is common in traditional surgery, too. For example, the head is fixed in position during neurosurgery through the application of a head-fixation device known as a ‘stereo tactic unit’. Fixation of the robot is achieved through analogous methods.
APPLICATIONS OF ROBOTICS IN MEDICINE
Abstract
Robots in medicine deserve enhanced attention, being a field where their instrumental ids enable exacting options. The availability of oriented effectors, capable to get into the human body with no or negligible impact, is challenge, evolving while micro-mechanics aims at nanotechnology. The survey addresses sets of known achievements, singling out noteworthy autonomous in body devices, either co-robotic surgical aids, in view of recognizing shared benefits or hindrances, to explore how to conceive effective tools, tailored to answer given demands, while remaining within established technologies.
Robotics for medical applications started fifteen years ago while for biological applications it is rather new (about five years old). Robotic surgery can accomplish what doctors cannot because of precision and repeatability of robotic systems. Besides, robots are able to operate in a contained space inside the human body. All these make robots especially suitable for non-invasive or minimally invasive surgery and for better outcomes of surgery. Today, robots have been demonstrated or routinely used for heart, brain, and spinal cord, throat, and knee surgeries at many hospitals in the United States (International Journal of Emerging Medical Technologies, 2005).
Nanorobotics is the still largely hypothetical technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a nanometer(10-9meters). Also known as nanobots or nanites, they would be constructed from nanoscale or molecular components. So far, researchers have only been able to produce some parts of such a machine, such as bearings, sensors, and synthetic molecular motors, but they hope to be able to create entire robots as small as viruses or bacteria, which could perform tasks on a tiny scale. Possible applications include micro surgery (on the level of individual cells), utility fog, manufacturing, weaponry and cleaning. This presentation provides a survey of current developments, in the spirit of focusing the trends toward the said turn.
Introduction
Robotics is a field that has many exciting potential applications. It is also a field in which expectations of the public often do not match current realities. Truly incredible capabilities are being sought and demonstrated in research laboratories around the world. However, it is very difficult to build a mechanical device (e.g., a robotic arm) that has dexterity comparable to a human’s limbs. It is even more difficult to build a computer system that can perceive its environment, reason about the environment and the task at hand, and control a robotic arm with anything remotely approaching the capabilities of a human being.
History of robotics
The word robot (from the Czech word robota meaning compulsory labor) was defined by the Robotic Institute of America as “a machine in the form of a human being that performs the mechanical functions of a human being but lacks sensitivity.” One of the first robots developed was by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495; a mechanical armored knight that was used to amuse royalty. This was then followed by creation of the first operational robot by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, in which an automated loom, controlled by punch cards, created a reproducible pattern woven into cloth. Issac Asimov further elucidated the role of robotics in 1940 through short stories; however, it was his three laws of robotics that received popular acclaim. The three laws state1) A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm2)A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with First Law and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law
Applications in Medicine
Robots are filling an increasingly important role of enhancing patient safety in the hurried pace of clinics and hospitals where attention to details and where reliability are essential. In recent years, robots are moving closer to patient care, compared with their previous role as providing services in the infrastructure of medicine. Examples of past use are in repetitive activities of cleaning floors and washing equipment and carrying hot meals to patients’ bedside. What is new is finding them in clinical laboratories identifying and measuring blood and other specimen for testing, and in pharmacies counting pills and delivering them to nurses on ‘med-surg-units’ or ICU’s. Or bringing banked blood from the laboratory to the ED, surgery, or ICU for transfusions. Robots are being used as very accurate ‘go-fors’!
An early active robot, ‘Robodoc’ was designed to mill perfectly round lumens in the shafts of fractured bones, to improve the bonding of metal replacements such as for femur heads, and knee joints. The future of this system remains uncertain because of questions about the ultimate beneficial outcomes.
The reasons behind the interest in the adoption of medical robots are multitudinous. Robots provide industry with something that is, to them, more valuable than even the most dedicated and hard-working employee - namely speed, accuracy, repeatability, reliability, and cost-efficiency. A robotic aid, for example, one that holds a viewing instrument for a surgeon, will not become fatigued, for however long it is used. It will position the instrument accurately with no tremor, and it will be able to perform just as well on the 100th occasion as it did on the first.
Robotic surgery
Robotic surgery is the process whereby a robot actually carries out a surgical procedure under the control of nothing other than its computer program. Although a surgeon almost certainly will be involved in the planning of the procedure to be performed and will also observe the implementation of that plan, the execution of the plan will not be accomplished by them - but by the robot.
In order to look at the different issues involved in the robotic fulfillment of an operation, the separate sections of a typical robotic surgery (although robotic surgery is far from typical) are explained below.
Surgical planning
Surgical planning consists of three main parts. These are imaging the patient, creating a satisfactory three-dimensional (3D) model of the imaging data, and planning/rehearsing the operation. The imaging of the patient may be accomplished via various means. The main method is that of computer tomography (CT). CT is the process whereby a stack
Of cross-sectional views of the patient are taken using magnetic-resonance-imaging or x-ray methods. This kind of imaging is necessary for all types of operative procedure and, as such, does not differ from traditional surgical techniques.
A patient having a brain scan
This two-dimensional (2D) data must then be converted into a 3D model of the patient (or, more usually, of the area of interest). The reasons for this transformation are twofold. Firstly, the 2D data, by its very nature, is lacking in information. The patient is, obviously, a 3D object and, as such, occupies a spatial volume. Secondly, it is more accurate and intuitive for a surgeon, when planning a procedure, to view the data in the form that it actually exists. It should be noted, however, that the speed of said hardware is increasing all the time and the price will decrease too, as the technology involved becomes more commonplace. This means that the process will be more cost-efficient and increasingly routine in the future.
The third phase of the planning is the actual development of the plan itself. This involves determining the movements and forces of the robot in a process called ‘path planning’ - literally planning the paths that the robot will follow.
A surgery simulation to aid planning
It is here that the 3D patient model comes into play, as it is where all the measurements and paths are taken from. This emphasizes the importance of the accuracy of the model, as any errors will be interpreted as absolute fact by the surgeons (and hence the robot) in their determination of the plan.
Registration of robot to patient
The registration of the robot and the patient is the correlation of the robot’s data about the patient with the actual patient, in terms of positioning. There are two important stages in the registration procedure - fixation of the patient and the robot, and intra-surgical registration itself. Fixation is an essential ingredient of a successful robotic operation. Robots act upon pre-programmed paths , these programs are much more complex if they must take into account the fact that the patient’s position may be different to the inputted data and, in fact, continually changing. For this reason it is imperative that the robot can act in, at least, a semi-ordered environment.
Fixation of the patient that is fixing the patient in position (i.e. on the operating table), is achieved through strapping and clamping of the areas pertinent to the surgery. This is common in traditional surgery, too. For example, the head is fixed in position during neurosurgery through the application of a head-fixation device known as a ‘stereo tactic unit’. Fixation of the robot is achieved through analogous methods.
