Safe Knife

Goals:

  • Better situation awareness and safety 
  • Improved surgeon performance and clinical outcome

Safe knife can detect when instruments move too close to a bile duct or major vessel, i.e., the areas to be avoided, with increasingly more intense warning colors, sounds, and/or force feedback. The scientific breakthrough needed arises from the fact that organs and tissues are deformable, thus presenting significant challenges to integrated surgical situation awareness and safety control. Through visualization, tissue modeling, and sensors within the abdomen, the surgical knife should automatically adjust power source, energy type, frequency and depth based on the tissue being cut.

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