Minimally invasive surgery is a surgical approach that involves use of instruments inserted through several tiny incision openings to perform a surgery causing minimal tissue trauma.
This minimally invasive surgery relatively reduces changes in metabolism of the patient in the period of post-surgical care, so it is beneficial to rapid recovery of the patient. Therefore, using such minimally invasive surgery shortens length of a hospital stay of the patient after the surgery and allows patients to return to normal physical activities more quickly. In addition, minimally invasive surgery causes less pain and reduces scar to patients after surgery.
The most general form of the minimally invasive surgery is endoscopy. Among them, a laparoscopy that involves minimally-invasive inspection and operation inside abdominal cavity is known as the most general form of endoscopy. To operate the standard laparoscopic surgery, an abdomen of the patient is insufflated with gas, and small incisions (about ½ inch or less) are formed for use as an entrance of a tool for the laparoscopic surgery, through which a trocar is inserted. In general, laparoscopic surgical tools include a laparoscope (for observation of a surgical site) and other working tools. Here, the working tools are similar in structure to the conventional tools used for small incision surgery, except that the end effector or working end of each tool is separated from its handle by an elongated shaft. For instance, working tools may include a clamp, a grasper, scissors, a stapler, needle holder, and so forth. To perform the surgery, a user, such as a surgeon, puts the working tool into a surgical site through the trocar, and manipulates it from the outside of abdominal cavity. Then, the surgeon monitors the procedure of the surgery through a monitor that displays the image of the surgical site that is taken by the laparoscope. The endoscopic approach similar to this is broadly used in retroperitoneoscopy, pelviscopy, arthroscopy, cisternoscopy, sinuscopy, hysteroscopy, nephroscopy, cystoscopy, urethroscopy, pyeloscopy, and so on.
The modes for these minimally-invasive surgeries may be classified into the single port surgery mode and the multi-port surgery mode based on the number of ports to insert surgical instruments into the surgical field, etc.
When a surgery is performed in the multi-port surgery mode, the surgery may rather be easy despite of disadvantageous increasing number of incisions, on the other hand, when the surgery is performed in the single port surgery mode, the level of difficulty of the surgery may rise due to the problems such as collisions among the surgical instruments whereas the reduced number of incisions makes the surgery less invasive. In this context, the applicant of the invention has already disclosed minimally-invasive surgical instruments with multiple degrees of freedom in the Korean patent application No. 2008-51248 and No. 2008-61894, and the applicant has further disclosed the advantages of the single port surgery mode and minimally-invasive surgical instruments suitable for the same in the Korean patent application No. 2008-79126 and No. 2008-90560, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Therefore, in case of real surgery, it is preferable to allow selectively implementing both of the single port surgery mode and the multi-port surgery mode according to various surgical situations in a single surgical robot system.