Axsis, a new prototype for cataract surgery
"Axsis, a system developed by the UK-based Cambridge Consultants, is a small,
teleoperated robot with two arms tipped with tiny pincers. It’s designed
to operate on the eye with greater accuracy than a human.
Cataract surgery requires a steady hand, and the most common
complication arises when a surgeon accidentally pierces the back of the
lens, a thin membrane that is only a few millimetres off target, causing
hazy vision.
Axsis aims to prevent this kind of human error. The device’s
articulating pincers are mounted on arms about the size of drinks cans,
with extremely light, strong “tendons” made of the same material NASA
uses for its solar sails. These pincers can sweep across a 10-millimetre
space – the size of the lens of the eye. This is just a demonstrations
model; in the final product, the pincers will be replaced with scalpels.
To control the robot, the surgeon sits at a station nearby and uses
two 3D haptic joysticks to move the pincers while watching their work on
a screen. The image on the screen is enlarged, so the surgeon can make
more precise movements, with the pincers operating at a tiny scale not
possible with the human hand.
One benefit of the system is that the software disables certain boundaries from being breached. “It won’t let you make the mistake of
punching through the back of the lens,” says Chris Wagner, the lead roboticist on the project.
Ian Murdoch,
an ophthalmologist at University College London, says he is interested
in the idea that Axsis prevents piercing the back of the lens. “This
happens in about 0.1 to 0.7 per cent of cases,” he says. “If the
complication rate is less then this would obviously be great.”
However, Murdoch wonders if Axsis really offers much advantage over
existing advanced cataract surgery techniques, such as laser cataract
surgery.
Axsis’s creators say that cataract surgery is just the start. “I
think it will quickly find more applications,” says Wagner. It could,
for example, be used in gastrointestinal operations. Put the pincer end
of Axsis on an endoscope and it could solve any small problems – like
removing polyps – then and there. “Nowadays, when you find something in
the colon or in the stomach, you leave it there,” says Wagner.
Wagner hopes the robot could one day enable operations surgeons can
only dream of. “We just want to push forward what’s possible.”"
Source: New Scientist
Comments