Development of SPINEBOT for spine surgery

In most spine surgeries, the physician directly performs the surgical operation with help of specially designed surgical tools along with off-line CT images and possibly with fluoroscopic images that provide the on-line status of current surgical operation for patient However, the surgical procedure generally requires accurate operational skills and intuition of the physician. Sometimes, trifling errors or misjudgments during surgical operation could result in unrecoverable damages to patients. To cope with these problems, robotic technology has been incorporated into the surgical operations in various levels. In this paper, a robotic system for percutaneous spine surgery, called SPlNEBOT, is developed. The expected roles of SPINEBOT are to provide the guide for the K-wire, to help the physician to locate and orient the position of surgery more accurately, and to compensate for respiration movement of the patient´s body during operation. A preliminary experiment has been conducted with a mockup environment of surgical operation. The experimental results confirm that the SPINEBOT is not only able to guide by accurately pointing and orienting the specified location, but also successfully compensate the emulated respiratory movement of the patient.