Clinical efficacy and performance evaluation of a bendable remote robot system for a bone tumour surgery: A pilot animal study

Background: Traditional open surgery for bone tumours sometimes has as a consequence an excessive removal of healthy bone tissue because of the limitations of rigid surgical instruments, increasing infection risk and recovery time. Methods: We propose a remote robot with a 4.5-mm diameter bendable end-effector, offering four degrees of freedom for accessing the inside of the bone and performing tumour debridement. The preclinical studies evaluated the effectiveness, clinical scenario, and usability across 12 total surgeries–six phantom surgeries and six bovine bone surgeries. Evaluation criteria included skin incision size, bone window size, surgical time, removal rate, and conversion to open surgery. Results: Preclinical studies demonstrated that the robotic approach requires significantly smaller incision size and procedure times than traditional open curettage. Conclusion: This study validated the performance of the proposed system by assessing its preclinical effectiveness and optimising surgical methods using human phantom and bovine bone tumour models.