A “eye-in-body” integrated surgery robot system for stereotactic surgery

Current stereotactic surgical robots system relies on cumbersome operations such as calibration, tracking and registration to establish the accurate intraoperative coordinate transformation chain, which makes the system not easy to use. To overcome this problem, a novel stereotactic surgical robot system has been proposed and validated. First, a hand–eye integrated scheme is proposed to avoid the intraoperative calibration between robot arm and motion tracking system. Second, a special reference-tool-based patient registration and tracking method is developed to avoid intraoperative registration. Third, a model-free visual servo method is used to reduce the accuracy requirement of hand–eye relationship and robot kinematic model. Finally, a prototype of the system is constructed and performance tests and a pedicle screw drilling experiment are performed. The results show that the proposed system has acceptable accuracy. The target positioning error in the plane was − 0.68 ± 0.52 mm and 0.06 ± 0.41 mm. The orientation error was 0.43 ± 0.25°. The pedicle screw drilling experiment shows that the system can complete accurate stereotactic surgery. The stereotactic surgical robot system described in this paper can perform stereotactic surgery without the intraoperative hand–eye calibration and nor manual registration and can achieve an acceptable position and orientation accuracy while tolerating the errors in the hand–eye coordinate transformation error and the robot kinematics model error.