Continuum and Soft Robots in Minimally Invasive Surgery: A Systematic Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Faster recovery, reduced trauma, and improved patient outcomes drive innovations in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Notwithstanding significant advancements, traditional MIS tools have been limited in navigating deep anatomical pathways and offering precise control at target sites. Continuum robotics has emerged as a solution, with recent developments enabling greater flexibility and maneuverability in surgical interventions. In this review, we first highlight recent developments in mechanical-continuum robots for traditional minimally invasive surgery and then summarize the current state-of-the-art in steerable catheter-based interventions. We discuss limitations to current approaches and explore the emerging potential of soft robots as a novel strategy to address the challenge of developing versatile, highly articulated flexible tools for minimally invasive surgical interventions. We hope that this review will, on the one hand, provide an introduction and resource for students and researchers alike, and on the other hand, will stimulate discussion vis-à-vis future directions in minimally invasive surgery.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it