Design of Remote Endoscopic Suturing Device

Many surgical procedures require incisions to be made on the target organ and the body cavity. In order to avoid infection, and to guide the body's wound healing process after surgery, it is necessary to perform accurate ligation and closure of these open wounds. Extensive research shows that suturing and knotting are considered some of the most time-consuming tasks of surgery, taking between 3.5-6 minutes for each single stitch. With advances in medical technology, most operations today are carried out through minimally invasive techniques that eliminate the large incisions on the body cavity. This makes a surgeon's task even harder. This thesis proposes a design for a new endoscopic suturing device which can be controlled remotely with single hand operability. The design introduces a novel two-way sliding latch mounted on the shank of a 1550 needle. This latch allows the deposition of a secure locked stitch along the defect. The needle is actuated by the push of a trigger on a pistol grip handle. The actuation mechanism is simple and robust requiring very few parts, and containing minimal moving parts within the device. A large scale prototype of scale 1.5 the actual size was built and tested on test specimen. The prototype functioned well and proved the mechanics and strengthened the overall design concept.