Clinical efficacy and performance evaluation of a bendable remote robot system for a bone tumour surgery: A pilot animal study.

Background: Traditional open surgery for bone tumours sometimes has as a consequence an excessive removal of healthy bone tissue because of the limitations of rigid surgical instruments, increasing infection risk and recovery time.

Methods: We propose a remote robot with a 4.5-mm diameter bendable end-effector, offering four degrees of freedom for accessing the inside of the bone and performing tumour debridement. The preclinical studies evaluated the effectiveness, clinical scenario, and usability across 12 total surgeries-six phantom surgeries and six bovine bone surgeries. Evaluation criteria included skin incision size, bone window size, surgical time, removal rate, and conversion to open surgery.

Results: Preclinical studies demonstrated that the robotic approach requires significantly smaller incision size and procedure times than traditional open curettage.

Conclusion: This study validated the performance of the proposed system by assessing its preclinical effectiveness and optimising surgical methods using human phantom and bovine bone tumour models.