Small, soft, safe micromachine for minimally invasive surgery

This paper describes small, soft, and safe (S³) micromachine for minimally invasive medicine. We have developed pneumatic balloon actuator (PBA) as S³ micromachine. The PBA is applied to a retractor for spacing in front of the endoscope. The PBA based surgical tool for a retinal pigment epithelium transplantation is also reported to demonstrate advantages of S³ micromachine.