CUHK team develops micro-robot for curved orthopedic surgery in narrow spaces

　　China News Service, May 23. According to Hong Kong Sing Tao.com, the Chinese University of Hong Kong won the Grand Prize in the 17th "Challenge Cup" National College Students' Extracurricular Academic Technology Works Competition, and it was the only one that won the Grand Prize at the same time. And the first prize of Hong Kong universities.

　　This year's "Challenge Cup" has nearly 22,000 entries from colleges and universities across the country.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong won a total of 5 awards in the competition, becoming the top of the participating universities in Hong Kong.

　　Wang Yan, Lin Hongbin and Wang Xuchen, Ph.D. students of the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the guidance of Professor Ou Guowei, developed a micro-robot that can bend an orthopedic surgical drill in a narrow space, and won the special prize.

The micro-robot surgical drill with a diameter of 4.5 mm can be bent at a 65-degree angle, enter the patient's body through a small wound, and bypass the human tissue structure to reach the target surgical site, thereby reducing intraoperative injury to the patient, shortening hospitalization and recovery time, and reducing complications disease probability.

　　The drill can be installed in a portable and easy-to-use handheld device, which is convenient for doctors to operate accurately and dexterously, and can also be installed on the auxiliary surgical robot arm to improve the precision of surgery.

The surgical robot system adopts the man-machine collaboration mode. Under the guidance of the robot, the doctor can drag the robotic arm to control the surgical tools to achieve precise and safe surgical operations.

Experiments show that the drill has the opportunity to be used in operations in narrow spaces such as transnasal and transsphenoidal pituitary surgery and transoral mandibular fracture internal fixation surgery to reduce tissue damage during surgery.

　　In addition, under the guidance of Assistant Professor Deng Mingquan of the Department of Pathology, Anatomy and Cytology, doctoral students Zhong Yihun and Chen Jinkun developed a new type of anti-cancer immunotherapy, which successfully genetically engineered the most abundant immune cell in the blood, the Neutrophils and won the first prize.