Image-Guided Interventional Robotics: Lost in Translation?

Interventional robotic systems have been deployed with all existing imaging modalities in an expansive portfolio of therapies and surgeries. Over the years, literature reviews have painted a comprehensive portrait of the translation of the underlying technology from research to practice. While many of these robots performed promisingly in preclinical settings, only a handful of them managed to evolve further, break through the commercialization boundary, and even fewer reached a wide-scale adoption. Despite the undeniable success of service robotics in general and particularly in some sophisticated medical applications, image-guided robotics’ impact remained modest compared to other surgical areas, especially laparoscopic minimally invasive surgery. This article aims to embrace the state of the art on the one hand, provide a comprehensive narrative of the situation described, support future system developers, and facilitate the translation from scientific research to applied clinical technology development.