Microfabricated Tactile Sensors for Minimally Invasive Surgery Tools

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) procedures have been growing rapidly for the past couple of decades. In MIS operations, endoscopic tools are inserted through a small incision on human's body. Although these procedures have many advantages such as fast recovery time, minimum damage to human body and reduced post operative complications, it does not provide any tactile feedback to the surgeon because the fingers cannot reach and palpate the target organs. Our sense of touch indicates the shape, size, quality and temperature of objects and is one of the most important inputs to our brains for decision making. Interaction between humans and the surrounding environment during different manual tasks supplies useful information. Were we to be deprived of this feeling, the story will be complicated, and our ability will be limited with poor precision. That is exactly the case with MIS appli­cations. This book reports on design, analysis, microfabrication and characterization of an innovative piezoelectric tactile sensor to be in­tegrated with MIS and surgical robotics manipulators. The contribution of this work is to bring the level of feel of touch of human's finger to the medical tools.