Lightweight Handheld Detachable Compliant Robotic Laryngoscope with Lightweight Intelligent Visual Guidance

Tracheal intubation (TI) is a routine procedure in hospitals and is often life-saving for patients who need respiratory assistance. However, the current intubation approach requires the physicians to have extensive experience, or there will be severe time waste or possible airway damage. Aiming to assist the physician in performing better and easier TI, this paper proposes a novel, lightweight, portable, detachable compliant robotic laryngoscope with a lightweight intelligent guidance module to assist with transoral tracheal intubation. The robotic laryngoscope comprises an endoscope-equipped steerable flexible segment on a detachable module and an ergonomic handle homed to the control units, a micro-computer, a joystick, a battery, and an LCD monitor. The steerable flexible segment with a tip camera is designed to fit the shape of the upper airway and identify the glottis in real-time. An additional anchoring mechanism at the base of the steerable segment has been specially designed to enhance the robot's intraluminal motion and laryngoscopic vision stability. A self-contained, lightweight learning-based glottis detection algorithm (within 5 MB parameters) is deployed in the portable device without the need to access additional servers or clouds. The system also adopts a modular design, where the robotic section and the driving unit can be detached and reassembled swiftly between the TI procedures. Finally, the working performance is verified by experiments. The result shows that the motion error of the steerable segment is less than 2.7% over its length, and the steerable segment can be inserted into the upper airway easily while the glottis can be detected in real-time.