THE SURGICAL ASSISTANT

The Surgical Assistant Workstation

The Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW) is a software development framework that can be used to develop new applications in robot-assisted surgery with augmented visualization. Robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery and micro-surgery—as presented by the da Vinci telerobotic system and the Johns Hopkins Steady Hand, respectively—can be improved by providing fully-integrated image guidance and info...

A readily available surgical assistant

Owing to the requirement of surgical senior house officers to prioritise acute admissions in the accident and emergency department, they are increasingly unable to be present in theatre to assist the surgical registrar. As a consequence, the surgeon has to rely on the scrub team to provide much-needed retraction with cases such as open appendicectomies. We have found the use of the Alexis® woun...

The surgical first assistant: are you compliant?

It is over a century now since the importance of the knowledge and skills of the surgeon's assistant were first considered (Brickner 1907). More recently both the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCSE 1999, 2011) and the Perioperative Care Collaborative (PCC 2007) have reviewed the role of the non-medically qualified surgical assistant. In 2012, the PCC published their review of the surgic...

A Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW) Application for a Teleoperated Surgical Robot System

The Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW) modular software framework provides integrated support for robotic devices, imaging sensors, and a visualization pipeline for rapid prototyping of telesurgical research systems. Subsystems of a telesurgical system, such as the master and slave robots and the visualization engine, form a distributed environment that requires an efficient inter-process com...

Engineered System Family #1: A Microsurgical Assistant for the Augmentation of Surgical Perception and Performance