The team’s goal is to address technical bottlenecks by developing highly dexterous and long-reaching endoscopic robots. “Robotic-assisted natural orifice surgery enables precise scaling of the surgeon’s hand movements, eliminates physiological tremors and utilises flexible robotic arms to access the body through natural orifices, facilitating virtually scarless surgical intervention,” explains Jia Gu, professor in the Faculty of Data Science at CityU Macau. The system can perform delicate surgical manoeuvres in curved and confined spaces and provide enhanced visual and haptic feedback so surgeons can interact with tissue more accurately. This accelerates recovery time for patients while shortening the learning curve for healthcare practitioners.
The flexible robotic arm has a diameter of four millimetres and can achieve a working length of up to 185cm. It can simultaneously provide high degrees of freedom with sufficient mechanical stiffness. “This unique capability allows the system to combine highly flexible navigation with stable tissue manipulation, dissection and cutting,” Gu says. Its distal end has an intelligent vision system, combining illumination, ultrasound, white light and fluorescence imaging.
Through AI-assisted navigation, the system provides the endoscope with a GPS-like guidance capability that helps surgeons identify lesion boundaries, invasion depth and procedural risks in real time. It delivers bidirectional haptic feedback with a remarkable range for measuring force. “This enables surgeons to experience a highly realistic sense of tissue interaction, closely resembling direct tactile contact with the operative field,” says Gu.
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Looking to the future, Gu believes that such systems can fundamentally reshape minimally invasive surgery. “This innovative approach to endoscopic surgery will ultimately lead to higher cure rates, reduced patient trauma and more equitable access to advanced healthcare services,” he says.
