The future of thoracic surgery: articulated instruments

New Instruments for Thoracic Surgery.

The future of thoracic surgery.

Thoracic surgery is taken to mean different things by different people. To some it is the surgery of the lungs, to others it is the surgery of the body from the clavicle above to the diaphragm below. My own interpretation has always been that it is the surgery of the body from the hyoid bone above to the umbilicus below. However it is defined it does usually depend upon some anatomical restrict...

An articulated handle to improve the ergonomic performance of robotic dextrous instruments for laparoscopic surgery

Hand-held robotic instruments with dextrous end-effectors offer increased accessibility and gesture precision in minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery. They combine advantages of both intuitive but large, complex, and expensive telesurgery systems, and much cheaper but less user-friendly steerable mechanical instruments. However, the ergonomics of such instruments still needs to be improved i...

[Impact of videothoracoscopic sympathectomy in thoracic surgery. Future considerations].

Surgery of the sympathetic nervous system has gained importance in recent times basically due to the good results of videothoracoscopic surgery for primary hyperhidrosis. It has gone from being an operation performed sporadically to one of the most requested in our area of expertise. With minimally invasive surgery, the morbidity has been reduced considerably and it has generated a call effect,...

Articulated Wheeled Vehicles: Back to the Future?

Articulated Wheeled Vehicles (AWVs) are a class of wheeled locomotion systems where the chassis is connected to a set of ground-contact wheels via activelyor passively-controlled articulations, which can regulate wheel placement with respect to chassis during locomotion. The ensuing leg-wheeled systems exploit the reconfigurability and redundancy to realize significant benefits (improved stabil...