Contents I. Introduction
Minimally invasive surgery is an operation technique established in the 1980s. The surgeon operates with specially designed surgical tools through a small incision of typically only 1 cm on the patient's skin. The patient benefits from a reduction of surgical trauma to tissues, decreased pain and significantly shorter hospitalization. Cosmetic benefits due to smaller visible scars must also be mentioned. These advantages for the patient however are accompanied by significant disadvantages for the surgeon compared to open surgery. The direct hand-eye coordination present in open surgery is lost [1], as is the direct manual access to the operation site. The long instruments are moved about the fixed point of incision, therefore two degrees of freedom (DoF) are tied and a loss of dexterity inside the patient's body results [2], [3], [4]. The movement is also subject to scaling depending on the depth of insertion. These are significant drawbacks of MIS, which make complex tasks like knot tying very time consuming and require intensive training. As a consequence, MIS did not prevail as desired by patients and surgeons. Only cholecystectomies (gallbladder removals) are performed in 95 % or more cases using minimally invasive procedures.
