IGOR: image guided operating robot

Existing imaging devices can be used to plan complex medical and surgical interventions. Advances in robotics provide the opportunity of assisting the physician or the surgeon in performing the intervention. Assisting both planning and performing of interventions first raises problems of matching of various multimodality data. Then the performance of an intervention with a partially autonomous system gives specific problems which are discussed. A general methodology for computer assisted medical interventions is proposed, which turns out to be a particular case of the classical loop of perception-decision-action. Clinical applications are presented.<>