Orthopedic surgery robot is suitable for trauma, spine, joint and other orthopedic surgery, used to assist doctors in preoperative planning and intraoperative guidance and the application of an important auxiliary surgical tool, with the advantages of accurate positioning to reduce errors, shorten the operating time, save doctors’ physical exertion, reduce the amount of radiation suffered by doctors, reduce patient bleeding and speed up patient recovery.
What is the core technology of orthopaedic surgery robot? The answer is positioning and navigation technology. This is a hot area of technology development and a key area for orthopedic surgery robot companies to focus on. Among the patent applications for orthopedic surgery robot-related technologies, the patent applications for positioning and navigation technology account for more than one-third of the total number of applications, and the next largest number of applications also include end-effector and its control, the structure of the whole machine, the arm and its control, and the control architecture.
Orthopedic surgery robot mainly consists of three parts: mechanical arm, imaging system and computer navigation system. Among them, the robotic arm is mainly responsible for surgical execution and operation, which needs to have precision, flexibility and smoothness of movement, as well as high sensitivity of the feedback system at the end of the robotic arm. The imaging system is mainly responsible for surgical modeling and planning, through real-time image monitoring, image acquisition, processing and analysis, according to which the surgical strategy is developed. The computer navigation system is the core of the robot system, responsible for planning navigation and positioning, and is mainly composed of computer software such as measuring instruments, sensors, and localizers.
To achieve accurate positioning and navigation of the orthopedic surgery robot, robotic arm positioning and control is the key, and the technology includes coordinate system conversion between multiple devices, safety boundary protection, motion path planning, absolute positioning and repeat positioning accuracy improvement, and force feedback sensing technology. The main components of the robotic arm contain servo motors, harmonic reducers, sensors and force controllers. In addition to a small number of surgical robotics companies using self-research robotic arms, most companies use outsourced general-purpose industrial robotic arms.
Next is the navigation and tracking technology, the main technology contains navigation reference frame design, tool modeling, feature point registration algorithm, visualization fusion, refresh frequency strategy, motion tracking sensing and control, etc. The orthopedic surgery robot navigation and tracking technology mainly uses infrared and visible light technology, and a small amount of magnetic navigation technology. Since orthopedic surgery sites use a large number of metal tools that can interfere with magnetic field signals, magnetic navigation technology is rarely used in orthopedics.
In order to achieve efficient and accurate image alignment, the PL300B orthopedic surgery navigation robot of Perlove Medical adopts the integrated adaptive alignment technology (trajectory method). By collaborating with the 3D C-arm of the same brand and matching the preset trajectory with the actual gliding trajectory with the help of the target cover on the C-arm frame, it achieves higher precision image alignment and is not affected by the image quality, realizing clinical accuracy of sub-millimeter level ( ≤±0.7mm), better than most similar products on the market with an accuracy of ≤±1mm
