A Surgical Robotic System for Transurethral Resection

Transurethral surgery is a noninvasive interventional procedure that delivers a tubular surgical instrument via the urethra to access surgical sites in the prostate or bladder for abnormal tissue resection. In the clinical practice, a rigid resectoscope is inserted via the urethra to access the surgical site. The resectoscope is manually operated by the surgeon. Due to the limited field of the view (FOV) of the resectoscope, difficult hand-eye coordination, hand tremor, and lack of depth perception, the procedure is laborious, having a risk of perforation and damage to healthy tissue. We develop a master-slave robotic system for transurethral resection. The system is composed by a user console and a slave robot. The user console provides surgical vision and intuitive human-robot interaction interface, and the slave robot performs the surgery accordingly. The slave robot further consists of a 6 DOFs (degree of freedom) serial robot arm and a 1 DOF end-effector. The robot arm is used to accurately position and orient the resectoscope inside the body. The end-effector is designed to hold the resectoscope and precisely implement the linear motion of the cutting loop by reproducing the user’s operation at the console side. Preliminary experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed system and the results have confirmed its effectiveness.