WCICA'2012 Plenary Lecture

Since 20 years, surgical navigation and robotics are two important technologies to improve the state of the art in medical treatment. To know where an instrument is located relative to a region of interest (organ, vessel, bone structure) inside of the body is of great importance to achieve a preplanned postoperative situation. To guide and to move an instrument by a robot is more complex but is definitely required for almost all kind of surgery. While surgical navigation became a standard in many medical disciplines, surgical robotics is still at it's beginning. Todays great commercial success of only one company with just one robotics approach (Telemanipulation), should not mislead to an interpretation that surgical robotics is now successful. There are still more problems than solutions. Also the visibility of this company is not typical for medical device companies. In the talk, several navigation and robotics systems are presented, that were developed within Germany during the past 15 years with different success. All of them skipped the barrier from idea to clinical use to the market. A collection of videos shows the robots use. Nevertheless, there are different mechanisms that are important to consider if a medical robot should be successful. These mechanisms are discussed and also the rules for researcher to design robots as medical device from the very beginning. Also some in-between solutions such as "Navigated Control" are presented to explain when a robot is useful and why sometimes a different solution is more successful. In future we will see, surgical robots and medical instruments that are patient specific printed on demand based on generative manufacturing methods such as Selective Laser Sintering of biocompatible materials.