Development of a smart retractor for neurosurgery

Surgery over vital organs proves to be one of the main challenges in the surgery medical eld, this is due to the maximum allowable pressure that might be excerted over an organ before causing irreparable damage to the tissue, such problem is more delicate in the brain tissue and is heighened by the fact that only with extensive practice and experience a surgeon is able to identify and work within these limits. For this problem the joint work between the Politecnico di Milano and some private stakeholders has produced a smart tool which would allow to perform neurological surgery with real time response of the applied pressures on the brain of the patient. This thesis aims to improve and characterize this tool, in order to obtain a satisfactory prototype that can be subjected to the test phase.