In single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS), magnetic anchoring and guidance system (MAGS) is a promising technique to prevent clutter in the surgical workspace and provide a larger vision field. Existing camera designs mainly rely on rigid structure design, resulting in risks of losing magnetic coupling and impacting tissue during the insertion and coupling procedure. In this paper, we proposed a wireless MAGS consisting of soft material and structure design. The camera can bend at the exit of the trocar and maintain strong coupling with the external actuator. The operation principle and modeling were established to investigate the parameter design. An easier insertion procedure was introduced and demonstrated in the experiment. The bendability was tested showing the camera could reach 20° in bending angle and 16.4mm in displacement. The insertion and deployment took less than 2 minutes on average.

Fully insertable laparoscopic cameras represent a promising future of minimally invasive surgery. The most characteristic technology adopted on these devices is transabdominal anchoring and actuation based on magnetic coupling. However, few have paid adequate attention to the safety concerns. As the camera is anchored against the interior abdominal wall without any force feedback, the patient is being exposed to a high risk of getting injured by inappropriate stress on the tissue. We have recovered the camera-tissue interaction force via a non-invasive approach in our previous work. Aiming to access the stress distribution, this paper presents a viscoelastic camera-tissue interaction model, which establishes explicit relations between the contact force and the stress distribution on the tissue. For the first time, a geometric constraint between the contact angle and the tissue indentation is introduced, which helps make the multivariable model solvable. Ex-vivo experiments on porcine abdomen tissue facilitated by non-invasive force measurement validate effectiveness of the model. This work lays foundation for improving control and surgical safety of using a magnetic actuated insertable laparoscopic surgical camera.

Fully insertable laparoscopic cameras feature more locomotive flexibility in a larger workspace compared to conventional trocar-based laparoscopes and thus represent a promising future of minimally invasive surgery. These cameras are principally anchored and actuated by transabdominal magnetic coupling. Although several proof-of-concept prototypes have shown the technical feasibility in terms of camera actuation and laparoscopic imaging, none of them are getting close to clinical practice due to concerns about safety. One common problem lies in that the interaction force between the camera and the abdominal wall tissue is completely unknown and not controlled. The camera is being manipulated in an open loop which exposes the patient to a high risk of being injured. In this paper, a noninvasive real-time camera-tissue interaction force measurement approach for an insertable laparoscopic camera is proposed, implemented, and validated.Ex-vivo experiments using a simulated abdominal cavity have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach during anchoring, translation, and rotation camera behaviors. Potential surgical impacts enabled by the force feedback have also been exemplified by a robotic-assisted camera control experiment using shared autonomy.

This paper proposes a novel in-vivo robotic laparo-scopic camera design with an optimized illumination system, which is a crucial component for achieving high imaging quality. The robotic camera design with three extendable wings can reserve sufficient on-board space to harbor the optimized illumination system without affecting the compactness of the camera. We contribute a freeform optical lens design method and develop three miniature optical lenses for the LEDs to achieve greater than 95% illumination uniformity, greater than 14, 000 lx illuminance on a target plane with a distance of 100 mm, and greater than 89% optical efficiency. The prototype is implemented and experimentally tested, which demonstrates great performance of the in-vivo robotic laparoscopic camera and the significance of the optimized illumination system.

This paper presents the design of a novel insertable robotic capsule camera system for single incision laparoscopic surgery. This design features a unified mechanism for anchoring, navigating, and rotating an insertable camera by externally generated rotational magnetic field. The design is inspired by the spherical motor concept where the external stator generates anchoring and rotational magnetic field to control the motion of the insertable robotic capsule camera. The insertable camera body, which has no active locomotion mechanism onboard, is capsulated in a one-piece housing with two ringshaped tail-end magnets and one cylindrical central magnet embedded on-board as a rotor. The stator positioned outside an abdominal cavity consists of both permanent magnets and electromagnetic coils for generating reliable rotational magnetic field. The initial prototype results in a compact insertable camera robot with a 12.7mm diameter and a 68mm length. The design concepts are analyzed theoretically and verified experimentally. The experiments validate that the proposed capsule robot design provides reliable camera fixation and locomotion capabilities under various testing conditions.

This paper proposes a unified active locomotion mechanism for a capsule-shaped laparoscopic surgical camera system. The proposed design integrates the camera's fixation and manipulation together by adjusting a 3D rotational magnetic field from a stator outside a patient's body. The stator generates both torque to rotate the inside rotor dome in all three dimensions, and force to serve as an anchoring system that keeps the camera steady during a surgical procedure. This design eliminates the need for an articulated design and therefore the integrated motors to significantly reduce the size of the camera. A set of stator and rotor designs are developed and evaluated by simulations and experiments.

This paper proposes an active locomotion mechanism for a wireless laparoscopic surgical camera. The mechanism consists of a stator with 17 iron-core coils and a rotor with 3 cylindrical permanent magnets inside the camera. Our motor-free design unifies the camera's fixation and manipulation by adjusting input currents in the stator which generates 3D rotational magnetic fields, and decouples the camera's locomotion into pan motion and tilt motion. In the simulation studies, our proposed design can conservatively achieve 360° pan motion with a 22.5° resolution, and 127° ~ 164° maximum tilting range for tilt motion which depends on tilt motion working modes and the distance between the rotor and the stator.