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At present, much of the research conducted worldwide focuses on extending the ability of surgical robots. One approach is to extend robotic dexterity. For instance, accessibility and dexterity of the surgical instruments remains the largest issue for reduced port surgery such as single port surgery or natural orifice surgery. To solve this problem, a great deal of research is currently conducted in the field of robotics. Enhancing the surgeon's perception is an approach that uses advanced sensor technology. The real-time data acquired through the robotic system combined with the data stored in the robot (such as the robot's location) provide a major advantage. This paper aims at introducing state-of-the-art products and pre-market products in this technological advancement, namely the robotic challenge in extending dexterity and hopefully providing the path to robotic surgery in the near future.

Physicians use ultrasound scans to obtain real-time images of internal organs, because such scans are safe and inexpensive. However, people in remote areas face difficulties to be scanned due to aging society and physician's shortage. Hence, it is important to develop an autonomous robotic system to perform remote ultrasound scans. Previously, we developed a robotic system for automatic ultrasound scan focusing on human's liver. In order to make it a completely autonomous system, we present in this paper a way to autonomously localize the epigastric region as the starting position for the automatic ultrasound scan. An image processing algorithm marks the umbilicus and mammary papillae on a digital photograph of the patient's abdomen. Then, we made estimation for the location of the epigastric region using the distances between these landmarks. A supporting algorithm distinguishes rib position from epigastrium using the relationship between force and displacement. We implemented these algorithms with the automatic scanning system into an apparatus: a Mitsubishi Electric's MELFA RV-1 six axis manipulator. Tests on 14 healthy male subjects showed the apparatus located the epigastric region with a success rate of 94%. The results suggest that image recognition was effective in localizing a human body part.

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is a viable alternative to general surgery with distinct advantages. Robotically assisted MIS, has been demonstrated to achieve higher accuracy and repeatability in comparison with those of manual procedures. Despite these advantages, owing to the nature of some surgical procedures in which dexterous tissue manipulations in deep narrow areas of the human body are necessary, there is a need for further miniaturized tools with smaller bending radii. To cater to this requirement, this study proposes a new compliant mechanism based surgical robotic forceps. It can generate four degrees of freedom at the tip of the forceps including two bending motions in two perpendicular axes, grasping and rotation. A better combination of the stress distribution through the elastic material, grasping force, and range of motion was determined based on a series of finite element analyses. In addition, the manufactured prototype underwent a series of laboratory experiments to evaluate its effectiveness. Details of the mechanism, finite element analysis, prototype implementation, and evaluations are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intuitiveness in robotic surgery is highly desirable when performing highly elaborate surgical tasks using surgical master-slave systems (MSSs), such as suturing. To increase the operability of such systems, the time delay of the system response, haptic feedback, and eye-hand coordination are the issues that have received the most attention. In addition to these approaches, we propose a surgical robotic system that induces a multisensory illusion. In our previous study, we reported that a robotic instrument we devised enhances the multisensory illusion. In this paper, we determine the requirements for inducing this multisensory illusion in a multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) MSS, and the first stage of prototype implementation based on the given requirements is described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]