Design of abdominal retractor

The purpose of this paper is to present the development and design of an abdominal retractor which allows a single person to perform operations and the fixation of the operation instruments can be done with one hand. The additional devices make the operation more comfortable for surgeons.

Conventional measuring devices have been designed and applied for determining axial forces in a surgeon's forearm during operations. The same forces must be transmitted by the frame of the retractor. Thus a simple truss structure of a retractor was done. Several types of fixations have been proposed and tested using the rapid prototyping. Finally, the abdominal retractor was manufactured from stainless steel.

The simple-to-use abdominal retractor was built. The standard surgery instruments were modified due to the fixation system of the frame. A wide variety of additional useful devices, such as a lamp, video camera etc., were also proposed.

The present abdominal retractor is user-friendly and all components are easily sterilized by conventional methods (Fig. 7, Ref. 6) Keywords: abdominal retractor, stainless steel retractor, standard surger, fixation system of the frame, lamp, video camera, conventional methods.