A Surgical Robotic System for Osteoporotic Hip Augmentation: System Development and Experimental Evaluation.

Minimally-invasive Osteoporotic Hip Augmentation (OHA) by injecting bone cement is a potential treatment option to reduce the risk of hip fracture. This treatment can significantly benefit from computer-assisted planning and execution system to optimize the pattern of cement injection. We present a novel robotic system for the execution of OHA that consists of a 6-DOF robotic arm and integrated drilling and injection component. The minimally-invasive procedure is performed by registering the robot and preoperative images to the surgical scene using multiview image-based 2D/3D registration with no external fiducial attached to the body. The performance of the system is evaluated through experimental sawbone studies as well as cadaveric experiments with intact soft tissues. In the cadaver experiments, distance errors of 3.28mm and 2.64mm for entry and target points and orientation error of 2.30° are calculated. Moreover, the mean surface distance error of 2.13mm with translational error of 4.47mm is reported between injected and planned cement profiles. The experimental results demonstrate the first application of the proposed Robot-Assisted combined Drilling and Injection System (RADIS), incorporating biomechanical planning and intraoperative fiducial-less 2D/3D registration on human cadavers with intact soft tissues.

Fiducial-Free 2D/3D Registration for Robot-Assisted Femoroplasty.

Femoroplasty is a proposed alternative therapeutic method for preventing osteoporotic hip fractures in the elderly. Previously developed navigation system for femoroplasty required the attachment of an external X-ray fiducial to the femur. We propose a fiducial-free 2D/3D registration pipeline using fluoroscopic images for robot-assisted femoroplasty. Intraoperative fluoroscopic images are taken from multiple views to perform registration of the femur and drilling/injection device. The proposed method was tested through comprehensive simulation and cadaveric studies. Performance was evaluated on the registration error of the femur and the drilling/injection device. In simulations, the proposed approach achieved a mean accuracy of 1.26±0.74 mm for the relative planned injection entry point; 0.63±0.21° and 0.17±0.19° for the femur injection path direction and device guide direction, respectively. In the cadaver studies, a mean error of 2.64 ± 1.10 mm was achieved between the planned entry point and the device guide tip. The biomechanical analysis showed that even with a 4 mm translational deviation from the optimal injection path, the yield load prior to fracture increased by 40.7%. This result suggests that the fiducial-less 2D/3D registration is sufficiently accurate to guide robot assisted femoroplasty.