Development of an Endoscopic Continuum Robot to Enable Transgastric Surgical Obesity Treatment

This paper presents the development of an endoscopic continuum robot for surgical obesity treatment using a transgastric approach. This proposed transgastric gastroplasty approach performs suturing and resizing of a stomach from inside, aiming at further reducing postoperative complications by avoiding the use of skin incisions. The presented design can be inserted into the stomach in a folded configuration and can be unfolded into a working configuration to perform surgical interventions. It uses sutures fabricated from pre-curved super-elastic NiTi (Nickel-Titanium) alloy to facilitate the motion of tissue penetration. Role of the NiTi needle is demonstrated in in-vitro tissue penetrating experiments, while deployment of this endoscopic robot was verified on the prototype.