An intelligent bone cutting tool in robot-assisted knee replacement

A medical robot has the potential to bring a surgery with high positioning accuracy. However, a traditional robot is not suitable for medical application due to its poor human machine interface. Particularly it is lack of a function for a surgeon to intervene or even dominate all the operation procedure. The paper presents a modulized design with an intelligent human machine interface for a knee surgical robot. A surgeon can easily control the whole operation process. At the same time the robot provides assistance of accurate spatial positioning for cutting bone during resection procedure. Moreover a CT-free surgical planner has been integrated with the surgical robot. Thus the features of low cost and high operation-friendly will make the overall surgical robot system high potential in orthopaedics surgery applications.