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Global Translational Medicine A Taxonomy of AI Assisted Medical Robots

configuration to reduce the trade-off between size and the robotic manipulation arms and the endoscopy into one
power, reflecting their comprehensive efforts toward trocar through the abdominal wall.
the exploration of NOTES. The navigation of NOTES The difficulties in using single port-laparoscopic
robots within the lumen would be a topic of interest robots lie in the solvability and theoretical formula
considering the synthesis of multiple AI technologies, derivation of multi-arm single-port surgical coordinates
such as visual semantic segmentation and recognition, trajectory mapping. As we know, the singularities of
inertial information fusing, and so on. The integration artificial intelligence-assisted robotic arms with a confined
of NOTES and soft-bodied robots would be another workspace are major issues. Notable innovative single-
technical direction, as conventional NOTES tends to cause port laparoscopic robot prototypes have been proposed
injuries and discomfort to the natural orifices of the body. over the past 5 years [67,68] . Bai et al. proposed an optimized
The soft-bodies design adjusts the integral positions and anthropomorphic coordinated control approach through
speed based on the pressure to the orifice. Hence, the dual-step optimization based on the dexterous arms in
tactile sensing technique plays a crucial role for the further human boxing maneuvers . Bai’s method has shown to
[67]
development of NOTES. achieve higher efficiency and less invasiveness apart from
2.2.3. Robots for retinal surgery addressing the issue of control. Wang et al. designed a
comprehensive system, made up of three 6-DoF robotic
The innovation of AI-ART robots for retinal surgery arms and a camera-mounted endoscopy, which could be
predominantly aims at reducing the risk of injury to inserted into the abdominal cavity through one trocar
the crystalline lens, corneal injury, and retinal tearing, with diameter <20 mm. Bai et al. attempted to address
all of which may lead to serious consequences and pose the miniaturization of laparoscopic robots and the
a challenge for surgeons [63,66] . The additional benefit of sophisticated control of robotic arms .
[67]
AI-ART robots for retinal surgery lies in the increased
dexterity and lower incidence of ocular hypotony. In the 2.3. Medical wearable robots
treatment of retinal vein occlusion, severe visual loss may Medical wearable robots are primarily for the improvement
occur; hence, retinal cannulation of retinal veins using a of body functionality, including the normal functioning
smaller-diameter cannula is the best approach thus far. of internal organs and limb movement. In medical
Within the past few years, there has been an increasing therapeutic scenarios, exoskeleton robots generally refer
interest in ultra-high precision positioning mechanism to rehabilitation robots. The focus now is on human-robot
and image segmentation algorithms. In 2021, Jinno interaction to improve the cognition ability and physical
[66]
proposed the use of snake-like robots to address the assistance provided by robots to humans. Another aspect
problem of restrained motion within a confined workspace of medical wearable robots is wearable artificial organs,
from an appropriate direction, in which multiple surgical which include microfluidic lung, bioartificial heart,
tasks were performed on the delicate cornea and retina. artificial hemodialysis (artificial kidney), artificial liver,
In 2020, Suzuki designed a miniature remote center of and so on [69,70] . The representative medical wearable robots
[44]
motion manipulator (RCM) with a positional precision are illustrated in Figure 5.
of 26.4 mm for teleoperated microsurgery. Retinal
surgery robots continue to be the best assistance for 2.3.1. Assisted chronic disease management
surgeons. Considering the complexity of retinal surgery, Compared with wearable nanosensors for medical signal
automated robots can contribute from three perspectives: collection, AI-ART for chronic disease management
(1) Understanding the current semantic processing; (2) mainly focuses on stage distinction and leveraging more
learning the control patterns or rules based on the semantic powerful artificial intelligent algorithms to support the
process; (3) conducting semantic processing when the decision-making process. For instance, patients with
surgeon requires. chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which is a type of
cancer that originates from the lymphocytes in the bone
2.2.4. Single-port laparoscopy marrow and spreads to the blood, causing infections and
A standard laparoscopy surgical robot usually consists of lowering the immunity, may endure the transformation
3–4 ports to supply accesses for the robotic arms, including into the next stage: Aggressive malignant lymphoma.
several manipulators and one planar or stereo imaging However, determining whether the patient is in the
endoscopy. Compared with manual open procedures of first stage or second stage is challenging due to limited
standard specifications, the standard laparoscopy surgical guidelines and insufficient morphologic experience of
robot can effectively reduce the invasiveness of surgery. The biopsy specimens. Therefore, researchers from University
incision is small as single-port laparoscopy robot integrates of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester and University of

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2022) 6 https://doi.org/10.36922/gtm.v1i2.176