REPOSITORY > RESULTS

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery is one of the most promising trends in medicine. Despite of its obvious advantages - the use of small incisions reducing trauma and risk of infection - it still represents a great challenge for the surgeon, as visual guidance and dexterity are severely impaired. In the case of minimally invasive mitral valve surgery, a special technique for blocking the blood flow in the aorta (aortic occlusion) is required, resulting in the need of a specific and long training. Our work focuses on aortic occlusion by means of the Port-Access technique which uses the EndoClampTM, a catheter with an inflatable balloon at its tip. We aimed at solving the difficulties associated with poor monitoring and difficult manual placement of this catheter. In this thesis we present a fully functional prototype which is a combined information and positioning system based on augmented reality technology and robotics where the position of the EndoClampTM can be seen at all times and can be automatically controlled by a robotic actuator. The results of our evaluation demonstrate the usefulness of the system: the users place the catheter faster and more accurately than with the current visual support. This work represents a major step towards safer and simpler minimally invasive cardiac surgery. Systems such as the one we propose can greatly benefit from wireless sensor technology. Wireless body area networks are a promising technology which can increase sensing ability in the patient while being almost unobtrusive. Nevertheless, integration of wireless sensors in existing computer assisted surgery applications in far from seamless. We addressed this problem by developing a component to manage connectivity and interaction between wireless sensors and applications. The component also manages quality-of-service (QoS) of data connections in the operating room. Such a component eases up the integration of sensor nodes in the system and increases reliability of the communication network, one of the most important issues in medical applications.