Collaborative Preoperative Planning for Operation-Navigation Dual-Robot Orthopedic Surgery System

Intraoperative optical navigation is widely utilized in robotic surgery systems. Typically, the observation pose of the optical tracking system (OTS) is manually adjusted and then fixed throughout the surgery. However, fixed OTS suffers from limited measurement volume (MV) and visual interferences, making consistent navigation challenging in clinics. In this paper, an operation-navigation dual-robot collaborative system is proposed for orthopedic surgeries. An extra navigation robot is introduced to actively adjust the observation pose of the OTS. A collaborative preoperative planning method is proposed for this dual-robot system, including osteotomy path planning of the operation robot and collaborative planning of the navigation robot. Firstly, osteotomy paths of the operation robot are generated according to the surgery regulations and the geometric features of the vertebral foramen. Secondly, based on the generated osteotomy paths, the collaborative planning of the navigation robot is formulated into a multi-objective optimization problem to find the optimal poses of the OTS for each osteotomy plane. Compared with fixed OTS, active navigation is capable of keeping all the targets within the MV of the OTS throughout the surgery. Semi-laminectomy on a human spine phantom is adopted as an example to experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Note to Practitioners
—As the demand for robot-assisted surgery is increasing, the precision of operation has become one of the key safety requirements. Preoperative planning provides guidance for the surgeon, and intraoperative navigation monitor the status of the lesion and the surgical tool in real-time. In conventional intraoperative optical navigation, the OTS is manually adjusted and remains stationary. However, the limited MV and the visual interferences introduce risks and uncertainties to the surgical system. In order to address the limitations of fixed OTS, an operation-navigation dual-robot collaborative system is proposed for orthopedic surgeries, which is composed of a surgical operation module and an active navigation module. The navigation robot is used to actively adjust the pose of the OTS. A collaborative preoperative planning for the operation-navigation dual-robot orthopedic surgery system is proposed in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on a human spine phantom. Experimental results show that the active navigation provides more freedom to the overall system by freely adjusting the OTS, which ensures the stability of the surgical navigation. In future work, efforts will be directed toward the identification and avoidance of the obstacle.