Design and development of actuating system for diagnostics application in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS)

This paper presents some initial concepts in the design and development of actuating systems based on shape memory alloy for Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). Specially the motivation is to design tissue/fluid storage mechanism which can be used to collect samples from the surgical area for further diagnostic procedure. The proposed hybrid design combines passive source of energy with the active source. The passive source is based on the storage of spring energy and the active source is based on utilization of shape memory alloy as a part of switching mechanism. Various design concepts for the switching mechanism are presented combined with the design of their prototypes.