Research progress of the robot-assisted ophthalmology surgery

Surgical robots have the advantages of high precision, high flexibility, high repeatability, and merging with minimally invasive surgery to solve the shortcomings of traditional minimally invasive surgery, and gradually into all fields of medicine.Foreign scholars have extensive research on medical surgical robots.Currently, Da Vinci surgical robots are the most widely used and most mature surgical robot system.Although our scholars started later, they also successfully developed a corneal transplant robot, MiaoShou-A robot, robotic vitreoretinal microsurgery system and so on.At present, Robot-assisted surgery are widely used in various medical fields, which has also been used in ophthalmology.Robot-assisted surgery can reduce the physiological tremor of the surgeon; improve surgical stability and accuracy; shorten the learning curve and so on.At present, Da Vinci surgical robots can perfectly complete the ocular surface surgery such as suturing of the corneal laceration, corneal whole-layer transplantation, amniotic membrane transplantation and pterygium excision.The corneal transplantation microsurgery robot developed by our country can also complete corneal looping incision and suturing of the corneal.As Da Vinci surgical robots have some limitations and can’t be well used in complex intraocular surgery such as vitreoretinal surgery.Handheld robot system, steady-hand robot system, master-slave robot system and various kinds of robots based on these systems are used in intraocular surgery.The pars plana vitrectomy(PPV), retinal foreign body Removal, retinal vascular sheath sclerosis, retinal vascular cannulation had successfully performed in harvested porcine eyes and endolaser for retinal photocoagulation was done in Irish rabbit.It offers the possibility for future intraocular surgery with robot-assisted.At the same time, wider application research of robotic surgery and improvement of a robotic system should be continued.