Snake-like surgical forceps for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.

Background: Surgical instruments greatly impact the performance of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) because they operate on tissues.

Methods: A snake-like surgical instrument, designed with 4 degrees of freedom (DOFs), is proposed for RMIS. The DOFs are as follows: opening and closing motions of the forceps, rotation of the forceps and bi-directional bending of the instrument.

Pose optimization and port placement for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery in cholecystectomy.

Background: Pose optimization and port placement are critical issues for preoperative preparation in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS), and affect the robot performance and surgery quality.

Methods: This paper proposes a method for pose optimization and port placement for RMIS in cholecystectomy that considers both the robot and surgery requirements. The robot pose optimization was divided into optimization of the positioning joint configuration and optimization of the end effector configuration.