ANALYSIS AND OPINION SMART SURGERY
coupled with a fibre to carry the light through the instrument to the device tip,’ Hendriks explained. ‘The light shines inside the body and interacts with the tissue by being absorbed and scattered; it then is picked up by a second fibre that carries the signal back into the instrument.’ This would allow surgeons to determine the kind of tissue that they are about to treat. The miniaturisation of photonics technology is crucial to the development of smart instruments like the biopsy needle. ‘Photonics plays a very important role in image-guided surgery… this technology requires compact spectrometers and light sources with a broad spectral range,’ confirmed Hendriks.
Dr Chris Dainty, an associate
at Cambridge Consultants, explained in his keynote speech that highly dextrous robots are being developed that will one day be able to perform
operations that are currently only done by hand. Dainty noted that the company has produced such a robot for use in cataract operations, the most frequently performed surgery in the world; 20 million are performed each year globally. ‘The whole operation
currently takes about eight minutes,’ commented Dainty. ‘The surgeon has to go in and
“This is an area that seems ripe for the sorts of benefits robots could provide – motion scaling, tremble reduction and image guidance”
scrape away a cloudy lens that’s about 10mm in diameter and replace it with a plastic lens – this is currently performed by hand with tweezers.’ In a video shown as part of Dainty’s presentation, Chris Wagner, head of advanced surgical systems at Cambridge Consultants, explained that
‘this is an area that seems ripe for the sort of benefits robots could provide – motion scaling, tremble reduction, and image guidance to avoid sensitive tissue.’ The new 1.8mm diameter
robot uses a parallel mechanism that minimises movement outside the body while granting full performance inside the body – an ability difficult to achieve with traditional surgical robots that require large amounts of space to operate. ‘The new robot is small on the inside and on the outside, and is able to be integrated easily into the operation workflow,’ Wagner continued. ‘This demonstrates that robotics technology can be applied on a scale that has never been addressed before.’ The company not only
envisions the new design being used in cataract and eye surgery, but also enabling a number of different neuro stimulator implants, early cancer diagnostics and flexible
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endoscopic treatments that have not been possible before because of the size of robotic mechanisms. Dainty drew his keynote to
a close by asking attendees to consider how photonics could be incorporated into this surgical tool, which could be used to deliver laser light, or be guided by imagers or spectroscopic sensing. ‘We need a lot of photonics to help us with this robot,’ Dainty said. SuperSonic founder Dr
Jacques Souquet added that the future of medicine needs to be preventative, predictive and personalised, and the continued miniaturisation of medical technology will help achieve this. In addition, the development of battery and display technologies in the video gaming industry could also impact medicine, he said, as augmented reality and 3D imaging are already being considered for use in surgical operations. EO
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