Development of surgical manipulator system "HUMAN" for clinical neurosurgery

Surgery using manipulator systems for medical treatment has recently attracted considerable attention as a method for realizing certain minimally invasive surgeries. In the field of navel surgery, some manipulator systems for medical treatments are used in Europe and the United States. However, it is inappropriate to apply these systems to neurosurgery because the size of the manipulators is too large, and only one of them can be used in one insertion part. To solve this problem, we developed the manipulator system "HUMAN", which has an insertion part with a diameter of 10 mm and contains one endoscope and three manipulators. In this paper, we propose the concept for realizing minimally invasive surgery, and discuss the mechanism and control of our developed system based on this concept. A clinical application using this system was successfully performed in August 2002, and was successful. Since the manipulator is so small that operation is possible from one small incision, this system is effective in realizing certain minimally invasive neurosurgeries.