Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Pedicle screw placement is the gold standard for spinal pathologies that require surgical stabilization. Accurate screw placement is important to avoid severe complications, but ensuring accuracy remains a challenge. This work proposes an optical camera-based robot-assisted drilling system for spine surgery. Preoperative CT scans are used to plan screw trajectories in both synthetic phantoms and ex-vivo ovine spines. After robotic drilling, postoperative scans are registered to the preoperative plan to quantify drilling accuracy. In total, 48 screws are drilled into ex-vivo ovine spines, producing a median entry point distance error of 1.51 mm (IQR 0.91mm, 2.10 mm) and an angle error of 2.30 ° (IQR 1.28 ° , 3.13 ° ), where 95.83% of the placements were clinically successful. Optical camera-based robot-assisted drilling system for spine surgery may increase accuracy by providing precise spatial registration between the patient anatomy and the robotic system, enabling accurate alignment and execution of the drilling task.
Source: Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Institutions: KU Leuven, University of Zurich, Universitätsklinik Balgrist
Language: English
Subfield: Surgery
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
Awards: SpineVib – The use of vibro-acoustics to assess the intraoperative fixation of pedicle screws., MIRACLE - augMented realIty-enhanced Robot-assIsted ultrAsound system for CervicaL spinE surgery, Radiation-free Diagnostic and Assessment Tools for Spine Surgery (Radar-Spine), Functionally Accurate Robotic Surgery
OpenAlex ID: W7154473719