Intuitive Hand-held Instrument for Loose Body Removal in Arthroscopic Synovial Chondromatosis Surgery.

In order to treat synovial chondromatosis in minimally invasive way, the loose bodies in the joint cavity should be removed with arthroscopic surgery. However, since the joint cavity is narrow and round, it is difficult to approach with conventional straight surgical tools. To overcome this, existing studies have proposed motorized steerable surgical instruments, but they do not provide haptic feedback and intuitive understanding of the position of the end-effector. In this paper, we developed a motorless steerable arthroscopic surgery instrument. It was designed with the ergonomic aspects for intuitive manipulation. It is geometrically modeled to define the mechanical parameters; diameter 5 mm, bending angle 90°. Design values and clinical significance were verified by an experiment and a phantom test.