Concept and clinical evaluation of navigated control in spine surgery

In this paper the new principle of Navigated Control for computer-assisted surgery will be introduced, demonstrated for spine surgery and experimentally evaluated. The new approach is based on the measurement of the relative position between an active instrument and the patient´s anatomy. Within the patient´s anatomy the surgeon is able to define geometries, e.g. a shaping volume. Instead of only visualizing the difference between the current and desired position or controlling the position by a robotic arm during the intervention the new concept includes the control of the instrument´s parameters, e.g. the rotational speed of a shaper. The experiments have shown that the principle of Navigated Control leads to similar results in accuracy as robot controlled shaping without complex mechanical structures.