Mechanical analysis of end-to-end silk-sutured anastomosis for robot-assisted surgery.

BACKGROUND Robot-assisted anastomosis holds great promise for the future. To secure surgery quality, some key process factors, such as the force arrangement of sutures, should be provided because of the lack of haptic feedback in robotics systems METHODS A model of anastomosis is presented to establish the mechanical relationship between vessel and sutures. Stress distribution of the vessel loaded by the suture was then achieved through finite-element simulations, based on the material property test results. Further, experiments were performed to validate the reliability of the FEM simulation of the anastomosis process. RESULTS To avoid blood osmosis, the allowable lower limit of the suture tension was 0.05 N. To keep the tissue free from injury, the allowable upper limit of tension on the suture was 0.4 N. CONCLUSIONS The study provided meaningful results for directing the robot-assisted anastomosis procedure and design of the surgical tools.