Preliminary Development of a Continuum Dual-Arm Surgical Robotic System for Transurethral Procedures.

Bladder cancer, with the leading number of new cases in all urinary system cancers and a high recurrence rate, poses a substantial threat to human health. Even with the transurethral accessibility, current surgical tools have not fully allowed convenient resection of the bladder tumors. This paper presents the design and the preliminary development of a continuum dual-arm surgical robotic system for transurethral procedures. This development aims at improving the current surgical treatments by providing intravesicular imaging with enhanced distal dexterity. With the proposed system, new surgical techniques for bladder tumor resection could be explored. The clinical motivation, design overview, system descriptions and preliminary developments of this transurethral surgical robot are presented. With the system constructed in the near future, a series of ex-vivo and in-vivo experimentations would be carried out to verify the proposed functionalities.