Various Fabricated Micro-Scale Tips for Laparo-Endoscopic Surgery Instruments

A new surgical micro-scale tip for laparo-endoscopic interventions is developed. The instruments tip allows movement and manipulation with two wrist joints and a gripper. The joints as well as the gripper are cable driven through the instruments shaft. The main topic of this publication is the processing of this micro-scale instrument tip using various production methods for prototyping, e.g. milling, fused deposition modeling, and selective laser micro melting. Laparo-endoscopic surgery is a wide spread surgical method. In the process, the abdominal cavity of the patient is opened through small incisions. Through an abdominal access a laparoscope is inserted to illuminate and capture the internal organs. The latter are shown to the surgeon by appropriate means of visual representation. To manipulate tissue or perform stitching usually two handheld laparoscopic instruments are applied, offering four degrees of freedom (DoF) at the instrument’s tip. To expand the range of applications for this gentle surgical technique instruments with two additional DoF at the instruments tip are used thus full manipulability is provided [1]. High functionality, high forces, and small cross sections are challenging issues for the design of such instrument tips