• DOI:10.5772/53
• Corpus ID: 4943409

Medical Robotics

@inproceedings{Desai2003MedicalR,
  title={Medical Robotics},
  author={Jaydev P. Desai},
  year={2003}
}

• J. Desai
• Published 2003
• Computer Science

The evolution of robotics in surgery is a new and exciting development. Surgical robotics brings together many disparate areas of research such as: design, development and modeling of robotic systems, nonlinear control, safety in medical robotics, ergonomics in minimally invasive procedures, and last but not the least, surgery. Over the past decade there have been significant advances in basic research and technology that have made it possible for the development of robots for surgery. One of the main advantages of robots is the increased precision and repeatability in carrying out surgical procedures, which were not possible in the past by a human surgeon. Robots and computers in conjunction can perform complex computations at much higher speeds compared to humans. On the other hand, humans are more adept in integrating diverse sources of information and making decisions based on their past experience of working in that field. They are also dexterous on the “human’’ scale, have very strong hand-eye coordination and an excellent sense of touch. Robots on the other hand have very good accuracy in carrying out pre-specified tasks, are not prone to fatigue or boredom, can carry out fast computations for surgical planning based on 3-D imaging data and other sensory feedback, and can also be designed for a wide range of operating conditions and scales. There are however severe limitations of robots and humans. One of the main disadvantages of robots is that they have poor judgment capability, limited dexterity and poor hand-eye coordination. Humans on the other hand cannot operate beyond their physical capability (their natural scale of operation) and are prone to tremor and fatigue [Taylor96]. Robots are thus seen more as augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing surgeons. The strengths and weaknesses of humans and robots are summarized in Table 1.