Design and development of a new biomedical/open sur-gical instrument

This article introduces a new biomedical / open surgical instrument to assist surgeon in applying surgical clips to patient’s body tissue and blood vessel during surgical processes. The new clip delivery system is designed to better the clip’s distal advance through internal clip channel, jaw guiding track, and all other transition areas to keep surgical clip from accidental shooting out during clip’s distal move into jaws. Currently the clip distal move in normal surgical instrument is usually driven by compression springs and some complains of clip accidental drop-off were recorded in surgical procedures. Because higher request of dimensional tolerance and better component surface quality are needed in case the compression springs are used as driven force, a little dimensional deviation or less qualified part surface produced from manufacturing processes will potentially cause surgical clip device malfunction or misfiring of the clips. It is clearly known that the jaws can seriously sever or damage patient’s blood vessel or body tissue if there is no clip inside the jaws due to accidental clip drop-off, when surgeons close instrument handles. The improved internal system design in this new open surgical instrument can prevent clip from accidental drop-off because of well guided and controlled clip distal move through internal clip channel and track. Besides the operational force to fully form clip is lower than existing surgical clip devices due to better mechanical advantage in this new instrument design. In addition to the above, manufacturing and product cost can be decreased since lower requirement of dimensional tolerance and surface quality of instrumental parts is allowed in this new surgical instrument design. This new instrumental prototype is build upon the analysis of computer aided modeling and simulation to prove its good mechanical advantage, feasible function, reliable performance. The preliminary results of instrument firing force from both computer aided modeling and prototype testing are very close to each other, and preliminary prototype testing shows no accidental clip drop-off in this new biomedical / surgical clip instrument.