Integration of a surgical robot and intraoperative imaging

Abstract The operating room installation at the department of cranio-maxillofacial surgery at the University Clinic Heidelberg consists of an operating table moving on rails in the floor (AWIGS, MAQUET GmbH and Co. KG, Rastatt), together with a sliding gantry computer tomograph (CT Emotion, SIEMENS, Erlangen, both Germany). With this setup of intraoperative imaging, we want to overcome the limits of marker screw registration that acts as the golden standard for robotic registration. The first robotic intervention performing a complex trajectory at the human skull was fulfilled by a modified Staeubli RX90 robot on a mobile platform. We adopted this robot for the setup with the intraoperative CT by using a gripper-change system with force-torque sensor measurement and an automatic registration algorithm.