Enhancing Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems

Image-guided surgical systems and surgical robots are primarily developed to provide patient benefits through increased precision and minimal invasiveness. The goal of this book is to present new methods and algorithms that support these systems, increase their accuracy and safety with intra-operative tracking, error reduction and advanced control. Three specific areas have been targeted for improvement. A new approach have been proposed to maintain the accuracy of the pre-operative registration procedures, based on the identification of motion events named surgical cases in the operating room. It is also crucial to improve the precision of integrated setups, and to determine the overall task execution error, therefore a stochastic approach was applied that offers an easy and straightforward solution to map and scale the error propagation. Finally, effective control structure was designed for telesurgery, relying on empirical controller design methods. It is strongly believed that robotics will have the same impact on health care in the next few decades as it had on manufacturing in the past 40 years, and will fundamentally change our lives.