This paper demonstrates the feasibility of ligation and tissue penetration for surgical suturing tasks using magnetically actuated suture needles. Manipulation of suture needles in minimally invasive surgery involves using articulated manual/robotic tools for needle steering and controlling needle-tissue or thread-tissue interactions. The large footprints of conventional articulated surgical tools significantly increase surgical invasiveness, potentially leading to longer recovery times, tissue damage, scarring, or associated infections. Aiming to address these issues, we investigate the feasibility of using magnetic fields to tetherlessly steer suture needles. The primary challenge of such a concept is to provide sufficient force for tissue penetration and ligation. In this work, we demonstrate proof-of-concept capabilities using the MagnetoSuture system, performing tissue penetration and ligation tasks using ex vivo tissues, customized NdFeB suture needles with attached threads, and remote-controlled magnetic fields. To evaluate the system performance, we conducted experiments demonstrating tetherless recreation of a purse string suture pattern, ligation of an excised segment of a rat intestine, and penetration of rat intestines.

This paper presents the design of a novel insertable robotic capsule camera system for single-incision laparoscopic surgery. This design features a unified mechanism for anchoring, navigating, and rotating a fully insertable camera by externally generated rotational magnetic field. The design is inspired by the spherical motor concept where the external stator generates anchoring and rotational magnetic field to control the motion of the insertable robotic capsule camera. The insertable camera body, which has no active locomotion mechanism onboard, is capsulated in a one-piece housing with two ring-shaped tail-end magnets and one cylindrical central magnet embedded onboard as a rotor. The stator positioned outside an abdominal cavity consists of both permanent magnets and electromagnetic coils for generating reliable rotational magnetic field. The initial prototype results in a compact insertable camera robot with a $\text{12.7}\;\text{mm}$ diameter and a $\text{68 mm}$ length. The design concepts are analyzed theoretically and verified experimentally. The experiments validate that the proposed camera robot design provides reliable camera fixation and locomotion capabilities under various testing conditions.

This paper presents an initial prototype of an in-vivo robotic laparoscopic camera that features optimized illumination to address the problems, i.e. inferior lighting uniformity and low optical efficiency, in the state-of-the-art designs of in-vivo laparoscopic cameras. Benefiting from the transformable structure of the robotic camera, sufficient on-board space is created without sacrificing the camera's compactness to carry three dedicatedly-designed freeform optical lenses for achieving the optimized illumination requirements. Designing miniature freeform optical lenses for extended light sources, such as LEDs, is a very challenging task which usually involves solving a non-standard Monge-Ampere equation. In this paper, we approach the illumination optical design based on a ray-mapping method that is governed by a standard Monge-Ampere equation. We propose an effective numerical solver to compute the ray-mapping solution for constructing freeform lens surfaces. Experimental results prove the predicted performance of the illumination system design: greater than 97% illuminance uniformity, greater than 80% optical efficiency, and greater than 14,323 lx illuminance on a target plane with a distance of 100 mm. The effectiveness of this prototype is also experimentally verified by performing a suturing task in a simulated abdomen.

This paper proposes a unified active locomotion mechanism for a capsule-shaped laparoscopic surgical camera system. The proposed design integrates the camera's fixation and manipulation together by adjusting a 3D rotational magnetic field from a stator outside a patient's body. The stator generates both torque to rotate the inside rotor dome in all three dimensions, and force to serve as an anchoring system that keeps the camera steady during a surgical procedure. This design eliminates the need for an articulated design and therefore the integrated motors to significantly reduce the size of the camera. A set of stator and rotor designs are developed and evaluated by simulations and experiments.