Characterization of Anastomosis Techniques for Robot Assisted Surgery

A connection between two vessels or other tubular structures is known as anastomosis, one of the most common procedures in its field but, at the same time, one of the most complex suture-based techniques. This procedure requires not only a lot of skill and dexterity but also a lot of attention and plenty of concentration from the surgeon. This makes many of the actions to be performed irregularly, exposing the patient to human error resulting from the monotony. On the other hand, the field of robotics has earned itself a place in medicine, especially as assistants during a surgical intervention. Even so, medical robotics is quite young and still has not done much in the field of vessel anastomosis. Therefore, this paper presents a preliminary study of the most common suturing techniques, taking into account their typology and performance, within all the possible anastomosis procedures known. Subsequently, a detailed study of workflow and actions during an anastomosis is made, obtaining a diagram for each of the suturing techniques studied. This allows analyzing all procedures and to create a tool to find those actions and repeated tasks and/or common in all of them, indicating which of these are potential candidates for an automation study. This preliminary work focuses on finding where robotics can help to avoid rutinary tasks, which can be learned in a mechanical level and therefore, relatively easy to be automated using a robotic system or to assist the surgeon in certain tasks that need a lot of skill and attention.