Article

Robotics has spread over many surgical fields over the last decade: orthopaedic,
cardiovascular, urologic, gynaecologic surgery and various other types of
surgery. There are five different types of robots: passive, semiactive and active
robots, telemanipulators and simulators. Hand surgery is at a crossroad between
orthopaedic surgery, plastic surgery and microsurgery; it has to deal with fixing
all sorts of tissues from bone to soft tissues.
To our knowledge, there is not
any paper focusing on potential clinical applications in this realm, even though
robotics could be helpful for hand surgery. One must point out the numerous works
on bone tissue with regard to passive robots (such as fluoroscopic navigation as
an ancillary for percutaneous screwing in the scaphoid bone). Telemanipulators,
especially in microsurgery, can improve surgical motion by suppressing
physiological tremor thanks to movement demultiplication (experimental vascular
and nervous sutures previously published). To date, the robotic technology has
not yet become simple-to-use, cheap and flawless but in the future, it will
probably be of great technical help, and even allow remote-controlled surgery overseas.

Langue : ANGLAIS