Towards Bimanual Operation of Magnetically Actuated Surgical Instruments

Advances in magnetically actuated surgical instru-ments have reduced the size and increased the dexterity of tools for minimally invasive surgery. However, studies typically focus on evaluating the control of individual instruments during tool development, while few studies examined the deployment of multiple tools, despite the common need for bimanual operations in surgery. When more than one magnetically actuated instrument is positioned in close proximity and controlled with the same magnetic field source, uncoupled and independent control of multiple instruments becomes challenging due to the complex magnetic interactions from the magnetic instruments' interference and the external field actuation. The current paper proposes a novel bimanual operation approach, where one instrument is designed to be actuated using a spatially uniform magnetic field with static directions, and the other instrument is designed to be actuated with a rotating magnetic field. The proposed concept was evaluated with experiments and demonstrated with a simulated bimanual tissue cutting task, using an electromagnetic navigation system and two magnetic tools (a gripper and a pair of scissors) that satisfy the magnetic actuation design requirements. During bimanual operation, experiments showed a 19% gripping force drop of the gripper and less than 10% closing force drop of the scissors, resulting in 35 mN of scissors closing force for cutting.