MEDICAL ROBOTICS

ABSTRACT
Medical robotics is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on developing
electromechanical devices for clinical applications. The goal of this field is to
enable new medical techniques by providing new capabilities to the physician or
by providing assistance during surgical procedures. Medical robotics is a relatively
young field, as the first recorded medical application occurred in 1985 for a brain
biopsy. It has tremendous potential for improving the precision and capabilities of
physicians when performing surgical procedures, and it is believed that the field
will continue to grow as improved systems become available.
Information and communication technology (ICT) and mechatronics play a basic
role in medical robotics and computer-aided therapy. In the last three decades, in
fact, ICT technology has strongly entered the health-care field, bringing in new
techniques to support therapy and rehabilitation. In this frame, medical robotics is
an expansion of the service and professional robotics as well as other technologies,
as surgical navigation has been introduced especially in minimally invasive
surgery. Localization systems also provide treatments in radiotherapy and
radiosurgery with high precision.
Virtual or augmented reality plays a role for both surgical training and planning
and for safe rehabilitation in the first stage of the recovery from neurological
diseases. Also, in the chronic phase of motor diseases, robotics helps with special
assistive devices and prostheses. Although, in the past, the actual need and
advantage of navigation, localization, and robotics in surgery and therapy has been
in doubt, today, the availability of better hardware (e.g., microrobots) and more
sophisticated algorithms(e.g., machine learning and other cognitive approaches)has
largely increased the field of applications of these technologies, making it more
likely that, in the near future, their presence will be dramatically increased, taking
advantage of the generational change of the end users and the increasing request of
quality in health-care delivery and management.