Design of a Novel Flexible Endoscope-Cardioscope

In this paper, we present a novel flexible endoscope (FE) which is well suited to minimally invasive cardiac surgery (MICS). It is named the cardioscope. The cardioscope is composed of a handle, a rigid shaft, a steerable flexible section, and the imaging system. The flexible section is composed of an elastic tube, a number of spacing disks, a constraint tube, and four wires. It employs the constrained wire-driven flexible mechanism (CWFM) with a continuum backbone, which enables the control of both the angulation and the length of the flexible section. Compared to other endoscopes, e.g., rigid endoscope (RE) and fixed-length FE, the cardioscope is much more dexterous. The cardioscope can bend over 180 deg in all directions, and the bending is decoupled from the distal tip position. Ex vivo tests show that the cardioscope is well suited to MICS. It provides much wider scope of vision than REs and provides good manipulation inside confined environments. In tests, the cardioscope successfully explored the full heart through a single hole, which shows that the design is promising. Despite being designed for MICS, the cardioscope can also be applied to other minimally invasive surgeries (MISs), such as laparoscopy, neurosurgery, transnasal surgery, and transoral surgery.