Search

Natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) is the latest surgery paradigm in which the abdominal cavity is accessed via the body's natural orifice, e.g., vagina, mouth, etc. Compared with traditional laparoscopic surgery, NOTES completely eliminates the skin incision and therefore benefits the patients in several aspects such as less post-operative pain, shorter recovery period, fewer complications, etc. Due to the unique characteristics of NOTES, instruments for traditional laparoscopic surgery are not suitable for NOTES and hence novel hardware design is necessary for facilitating system development. This paper gives an overview of the state of the arts in the development of surgical instruments for NOTES, particularly with a focus on the promising robotic endoscopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Off-the-shelf industrial robotic technologies have achieved significant advancements in the past several decades in terms of mechanics and automation performances. We are expecting to take advantage of the industrial robots for assisting surgeons in surgeries and quick prototyping a robotic surgery system. In precise computer-assisted surgeries (CASs), such as pelvic-acetabular surgery, eye surgery, or neurosurgery, it is extremely important to position the tools accurately and precisely for surgical operations. Some of the industrial robotics arms are able to achieve good repeatability and dexterity while positioning the surgical tools. To enable the application of industrial robots in the surgical rooms, there are several other essential modules to be integrated to the robotic surgery systems, such as real-time navigation system, surgical planning system, and surgeon-guidance system. In this paper, we review the existing studies on the medical robots including the ones using industrial robots, and then investigate the essentials for using industrial robots in computer-integrated surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the radiation characteristics with respect to the suitability of using homogeneous phantom for testing the compliance of radiation frequency devices are assessed. The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is applied to analyze the variations of a 900 MHz half-wavelength dipole antenna's biological effects and link performance depending on distance between antenna and human body model. The distance between the surface of the model and the outside exposure source is changed from 25 mm to 1 mm within the range of λ/2π. The distributions of the specific absorption rates (SARs) and the electric fields for various vertical slices of a simplified homogeneous phantom and three anatomical human body trunk models are calculated, respectively. The legs and head have little influence on the radiation characteristics of body-worn, ingestible or implantable wireless devices. The results demonstrate that a homogenous representation of human body is suited for assessing the averaged SARs in human body and confirm that the local energy absorption details and communication link performance need to be analyzed by using the anatomical models or by combining with the worst-case consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless network of wearable biomedical sensors by human body shows great potential to enhance the biometrics performance significantly. Meanwhile, it poses prominent characteristics and challenges to physicians and engineers for its particular medical application as compared to other application of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Mobility pattern plays an important role in designing the wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) and will also affect the accuracy of modeling WBSN in health care application. Much of the mobility scenarios generated in current work of wireless body sensor networks has used fairly simple models to generate the mobile topological graph, which bear little resemblance to the actual mobility patterns. This paper is the first attempt to investigate the mobility model in WBSN based on the existing mobility models in wireless data networks and ad hoc networks. We first briefly review the existing mobility models in related research areas such as wireless ad hoc network and cellular networks. Further on, we propose a dedicated and more realistic mobility model named BAMM (Body Area Mobility Model) for wireless body sensor networks by concentrating on the unique characteristics of WBSN and finally study the effects of mobility on the performance of WBSN by simulation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]