Operation planning of robot supported surgical interventions

Presents a new operation planning system which enables a surgeon to plan and perform complex robot-supported surgical interventions. The system has been evaluated in the Clinic for Cranio-Maxillo-Facial Surgery at the University of Heidelberg. In contrast to commercial systems, our goal was that the system should consider the complete surgical intervention and not just a single procedure of it. A second goal was that the system should enable the management of complex operations, independent of which way the intervention is intra-operatively performed (without technical support, with passive navigation support or with active support by robots). Our system supports the surgeon during pre-operative planning as well as during the intra-operative execution phase. Therefore, we developed a model of the course of operation by which the management of surgical interventions is made possible. The focus of this paper is on this course model. First, we introduce instruction graphs and describe the structure of each activity, observing its attributes and their context. Additionally, various surgical scopes are presented which enable the surgeon to select one view among different ones in the individual operation procedures, in accordance with medical and technical knowledge as well as in accordance with different degrees of abstraction. Finally, we demonstrate the realisation of the introduced course model in our operation planning system and present first results in clinical practice.