New hand-held surgical instrument characterized by high performance and reduced costs
| Patent title | Laparoscopic surgical instrument |
|---|---|
| Thematic area | Health |
| Ownership | ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA' DI BOLOGNA |
| Inventors | Leonardo Magnani, Fabio Manferrari, Luca Luzi, Filippo Battocchi, Giulia Avallone, Enrico Federici, Rocco Vertechy, Nicola Sancisi, Vincenzo Parenti Castelli |
| Protection | International, China |
| Licensing status | Available for development agreements, option, license and other exploitation agreements |
| Keywords | Minimally invasive surgery, Laparoscopy, Low-cost tools, Disposable tools, High-performance tools |
| Filed on | 07 August 2020 |
Laparoscopic surgery, also known as Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a surgical technique developed in the late ’50 where surgeons can manipulate the internal tissues of the patients remaining with their hands away from the surgical field, therefore reducing invasiveness and recovery times as well as costs.
Recently-developed robotic laparoscopic systems are highly accurate and performing though they imply high purchase and maintenance costs, higher encumbrances, and high pre-surgery time to set up the robot for the patient.
Hand-held surgical tools guarantee in general a sufficient precision of execution for many surgical procedures, the surgery time is lower (for trained surgeons) and less expensive in comparison with surgical robotic systems. However, nowadays the cost of a hand-held surgical instrument with high performances is still pretty high, therefore quite often cheap, but less efficient tools are used by surgeons with a consequent decrease in surgical performances.
Within this frame, there is a need to design hand-held surgical instruments that can provide a good compromise between high efficiency and as lower as possible costs.
The invention deals with a new cheap hand-held surgical instrument equipped with a highly dexterous extremity, and disposable. This kind of hand-held instruments merges the advantages of both robotic systems (dexterous extremity) and hand-held surgical instruments (low cost) making the execution of very precise surgical intervention possible while keeping very low costs.
The device is used as a tool to perform any laparoscopy surgery both manual and with a remote control robotic system by the surgeon.
Advantages:
- High-performance tools that facilitate the surgeon's work, as compared to lower costs
- Possibility of building many parts of the tool by plastic and flexure hinges;
- Significant reduction of the clamp/scissor size;
- Disposable;
- Applicable to both hand-held surgery and robotic remote control.