Robot Controlled Osteotomy in Craniofacial Surgery

Abstract

Interventions in craniofacial surgery are a great challenge to the operating surgeon, as high precision and long practise are required to perform optimal bone repositionings and to achieve and aesthetic and satisfactory result. Although methods and devices for the preoperative planning of bone repositionings do already exist, the accurate intraoperative transposition of a surgical plan still is a problem. For this solution a joint procject to develop a computer aided method using a surgical robot to control the surgeon's movements while cutting bone was conceived by the surgeons of the Clinic of Maxillofacial Surgery of the University of Heidelberg and the engineers at the Intitute of Process Control and Robotics (IPR), whichwe present in this paper.