Miniaturisation in robotic-assisted surgery

Robotic-Assisted Surgery (RAS) helps surgeons perform minimally invasive procedures, making specialist surgery more accessible and allowing patients to recover faster. Robotic tool miniaturisation further lessens invasiveness, so size reduction is a common innovation goal.

An exciting area of innovation in RAS focuses on deploying ever-smaller tools into the body. Whether a system is endoluminal, single/multi-port abdominal, endovascular, or microsurgical, miniaturised tools help reduce the trauma of surgery and facilitate access through existing tissue structures. The goal is to further reduce the invasiveness of the path used to access the surgical site.

However, this presents a host of technical challenges surrounding factors like navigation, visualisation, and tissue manipulation. Overcoming these issues requires an understanding of how miniaturisation fundamentally impacts the ability of RAS systems to access the surgical site and perform useful work. This demands an approach involving deep technical and engineering expertise, grounded in an understanding of the scientific first principles.

This whitepaper considers principles governing robotic tool miniaturisation and key challenges defined by surgical applications. We look at miniaturisation in terms of enabling technologies, existing approaches, and likely future developments, then drill down into the actuation and transmission needed to manipulate miniaturised instruments. We also provide an overview of the differing levels of miniaturisation offered by existing RAS products. This encompasses systems under development as well as those that are commercially available.

Additional miniaturisation goals

Miniaturisation objectives for surgical robotics outside the scope of this paper include reducing system footprint within the Operating Room (OR) and making systems easy to move between ORs. THINK Surgical’s TMINI™ Miniature Robotic System addresses both goals for orthopaedic surgical applications. It features a wireless robotic handpiece and has a small footprint for ease of integration into OR workflows.