Toward image-guided robotic surgery: Determining intrinsic accuracy of the da Vinci robot: Kwartowitz DM, Herrell SD, Galloway RL, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Urologic Surgery, Departments of Surgery and Neurological Surgery, Vande

The use of robotics in medicine has been growing in recent years. The introduction of specialized robots for surgery such as the da Vinci (Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, CA, USA) has largely motivated this growth. The currently available robotic-assisted surgery systems rely only on direct vision through the use of a laparoscopic camera for surgical guidance. While these cameras provide a stereoscopic view of the surface, they are incapable of showing beneath the surgical surface. In other surgical developments, image guidance has become an integral part of navigation and planning, allowing understanding of the locations beneath the surgical plane. As an early step in the development of a robotic image-guided surgical (RIGS) system, the physical limitations of a surgical robot must be assessed. In this paper the accuracy and the precision of the da Vinci surgical system are quantified. It is shown that the da Vinci system can successfully localize a point with an approximate fiducial localization error (FLE) of 1 mm. This FLE value demonstrates that the da Vinci is within the accuracy limits of the other commonly used surgical localizers.