Lans: a haptic system for minimally invasive radio-surgery

Medical robotics and computer assisted surgery are new and promising applications of robotics, whose main goals are surgical augmentation, information enhancement and surgical action enhancement. The paper presents the design of a new haptic master-slave teleoperation system for minimally invasive radio-surgery, carried out at the Department of Innovation in Mechanics and Management of University of Padova. The system, named LANS (Linear Actuator for NeuroSurgery), consists of a slave robotic actuator and a haptic master that will be operated by the surgeon. The slave moves a low-energy x-ray emitter along the radiological emission axis, while the master interface is a haptic hand grip. This technological innovation should help surgeons to overcome various difficulties and let them perform more precise and safer stereotactic neurosurgery interventions. After a general introduction to stereotactic neurosurgery, surgical application of the LANS is described. After that, design requirements, i.e. accuracy, dimensions and weight, are set and discussed, and final system layout is illustrated. Finally, control scheme is presented