Uniaxial Wireless Tissue Palpation Device for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Nowadays surgery tends to be performed with minimally inva-sive techniques that result in less post-operative pain, recovery time and smaller incisions. However, unlike open surgery, during minimally invasive surgery (MIS) the surgeon has few chances to rely on tactile and kinesthetic feedback [1]. Tissue palpation aids in preventing traumas or in leveraging tactile information to iden-tify tumors, vessels and organic structures buried underneath the tissue surface. Therefore, in the last two decades, research on pal-pation devices strived to restore tactile and kinesthetic sensations in MIS. This was pursued by performing tissue palpation with dif-ferent techniques, such as indenting [2], grasping [3] or rolling [1]. Despite this research effort, a translation into clinical practice is still far to come. Even further, surgeons are resistant to the option of devoting a surgical port to a palpation device, because of the available ports are needed for the MIS instruments. As an alternative to this approach, intraoperative ultrasonography devi-ces (IOUS) may be used to detect buried structures [4]. Also this technology, however, requires a dedicated surgical port during the entire procedure.