Robot-assisted skull base surgery

We created an image-guided robot system to assist with skull base drilling by integrating our Steady Hand Robot with a Medtronic StealthStationreg Navigation System via its Stealthlink portal. The objective of this procedure is to create a opening in the skull base to allow access for neurosurgical interventions such as aneurysm clipping or tumor biopsy. The motivation for introducing an image-guided robot is to improve safety by preventing the surgeon from violating critical structures during the drilling procedure. Our approach is to attach the cutting tool to the robot end-effector and operate the robot in a cooperative control mode, where robot motion is determined from the forces and torques applied by the surgeon. We employ "virtual fixtures" to constrain the motion of the cutting tool so that it remains in the safe zone that was defined on a preoperative CT scan. This paper presents the system design and the results of phantom experiments performed with a synthetic skull.