IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering

Functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) is a common minimally invasive technique but remains manually operated by the surgeon with one hand holding the endoscope most of the time. This article reports a novel robotic system for side-by-side assistance of endoscope positioning with the surgeon in FESS from platform development to clinical validation. The design emphasizes clinical considerations for both operational safety and user ergonomics, which were validated by clinical trials to demonstrate good surgical applicability in terms of efficient robot set-up and enabling three-handed procedures performed by the surgeon alone, without disrupting the routine practice of FESS... Read more