On the Feasibility of a Moving Support for Surgery on the Beating Heart

In this paper the use of a heart-tracking hand support is proposed to allow coronary artery bypass grafting surgery to take place on the beating heart. Requiring only a three-degree-of-freedom motion platform that tracks a point on the surgical site, this method eliminates the tissue damage associated with the use of physical heart stabilizers and provides a much cheaper alternative to six-degree-of-freedom master-slave systems.