A Robot Arm for Assisting Liver Surgery

Abstract

Liver surgery is a complex operation. During the operation, even with the help of realtime CT imaging, doctors often struggle in finding the exact tumor positions. This paper introduces a robot arm specially designed for assisting liver surgery. It includes a 5 DOF (Degree-of-Freedom) robot arm and a computer software system. The position resolution of the robot arm is 0.1mm and the software system is developed using Visual C++. The robot arm can hold an endoscope. With the help of electromagnetic position tracking device, the robot arm can also show the path of the endoscope during the surgery. To test the accuracy of the robot arm, a prototype is designed and built. The experiment results show that the position accuracy of the robot arm is 0.3mm, sufficient for assisting liver surgery. In addition, the cost of this system is only about US$10, 000, much lower than thesurgical robot systems in the market.

Keywords:

• robot
• liver surgery
• robot path generation