Robot-patient registration for image-guided robotic surgery in bone fracture reduction

Abstract

Image-guided robotic bone fracture surgery is a medical procedure that automatically positions and controls a surgical robot for aligning fractured bones. In this robotic surgery, the key task is to find an accu-rate relationship between the robot and the bone, which is referred to as robot-patient registration. In the robot-patient registration, robot and bone structures often interfere mutually to hide important features which are used for a registration in X-ray images, thus leading to inaccurate registration. In order to solve this problem, an optimization method using two bidirectional X-ray images is pro-posed. Using alternative image information, undesired feature occlusion can be avoided. In addition, by the optimization based on the distance between features, registration error can be reduced. The experimental results show that the proposed robot-patient registration can improve the accuracy of the robot-patient registration.