A new RCM mechanism for an ear and facial surgical application
This is an incremental improvement for ear and facial surgery, enhancing ergonomics and visualization for surgeons.
The paper tackled the problem of limited endoscope mobility in narrow surgical areas like the middle ear and sinus cavity by developing a new remote center of motion (RCM) mechanism based on an agile eye architecture and double parallelogram, which offers a wide, singularity-free working space and improved rendering compared to binocular scopes.
Since the insertion area in the middle ear or in the sinus cavity is very narrow, the mobility of the endoscope is reduced to a rotation around a virtual point and a translation for the insertion of the camera. This article first presents the anatomy of these regions obtained from 3D scanning and then a mechanism based on the architecture of the agile eye coupled to a double parallelogram to create an RCM. This mechanism coupled with a positioning mechanism is used to handle an endoscope. This tool is used in parallel to the surgeon to allow him to have better rendering of the medium ear than the use of Binocular scope. The mechanism offers a wide working space without singularity whose borders are fixed by joint limits. This feature allows ergonomic positioning of the patient's head on the bed as well as for the surgeon and allows other applications such as sinus surgery.