PROBOT: Automated prostate surgery
In 1988, Brian Davies, a medical robotics professor at the Imperial College, London, designed a robot (with the help of colleagues) that could remove soft tissue from a person. It was one of the first robots to do so. What’s more, it could perform the task with a fair degree of autonomy.
Most industrial robots usually have an arm, complete with a shoulder, elbow and wrist mechanism, and a gripper tool for the hand. That’s overkill for surgical purposes, and because of the room needed to move a robot arm around, it might even be dangerous for use in very small spaces inside human bodies. That’s why Davies and his team designed a small robot that has three axes of movement, plus a fourth axis to move a cutter for prostate surgery. (See a simplified drawing of the robot’s structure.)
The geometry of this design means the robot can hollow out a cavity from within the prostate gland. The robot is controlled by a pair of programmable embedded motor control systems. The system are directed using a i486DX2-based PC. The robot allows surgeons to specify the correct cutting sequence to remove tissue.
But the idea of having any degree of independent behaviour in a robot didn’t catch on. Although its designers tested the PROBOT in the lab and in human subjects, it was never used widely in surgery.
"Doctors just didn’t feel comfortable with the idea," says Justin Vale, a consultant neurological surgeon at Imperial College and a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons. "The PROBOT project shut down when funding for it ran out."
Credit: Imperial College London