No abstract

Colonoscopies allow surgeons to detect common diseases, that is, colorectal cancer, ulcers, and other ailments. However, there is a risk of bleeding in the lower gastrointestinal (GI) tract while maneuvering endoscopes. This may be due to perforations, hemorrhaging, polyps, diverticula, or post‐biopsy complications. Thus, it is essential for the surgeon to be able to detect bleeding at the site and evaluate the severity of blood leakage. Herein, a soft sensor that can detect the presence of blood at the bleeding site during colonoscopies is presented. The sensor consists of optical waveguides that interface with a microfluidic channel. Blood flow causes absorption and scattering of incident light that can be picked up by the optical sensing apparatus via light transmission through the waveguide. The surgeon can be alerted when bleeding occurs through a graphical user interface. The device is compact and measures only 1 mm thick. This allows the sensor to be circumferentially mounted onto a colonoscope at different locations. The sensor is able to record the presence of blood as an optical loss, rapidly detect the presence of blood under 100 ms as it enters the microchannel, and differentiate between gastric fluid and blood through changes in measured optical loss.

No abstract

No abstract

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has countless benefits over open surgery, from shorter re- covery times and lower risk procedures for the patient to higher accuracy and broader capabilities for the surgeon [1]. However, a significant detriment to these procedures is that current systems lack haptic feedback. The lack of haptic feedback in MIS forces the surgeon to depend merely on visual cues, such as the deformation of tissue under load, to estimate the forces [1]. The likely outcome of misreading these cues is torn tissue, patient discomfort or broken sutures [2]. Moreover, haptic feed- back is specifically vital for robot-assisted endoscopy procedures. A recent study evaluating an Endoscopic Operation Robot (EOR) concluded that haptic feedback is beneficial in remote manipulation of flexible endo- scopes. When haptic feedback was absent there were more incidences of overstretching of sigmoid colon in a colonoscopy training model [3]. This work presents a soft robotic glove that provides haptic feedback for endoscopic procedures (Fig. 1, A). In our previous work, we introduced a soft robotic sleeve [4] that can detect forces between a colonoscope and colon walls during navigation. The glove receives force input from the soft robotic sleeve wrapped around the colonoscope (Fig. 1, B). Any incident force on the sleeve, during endoscopic navigation, is relayed to the surgeon as haptic feedback through proportional inflation of the glove’s pneumatic actuators.