Pedro M. B. Torres

A Vision System for Robotic Ultrasound Guided Orthopaedic Surgery

Surgical navigation is a crucial concept in computer assisted surgery. The use of robots in the surgery room largely benefits from this concept’s recent developments, namely with the use of non-invasive and radiation free imaging systems, like ultrasound (US). This paper presents the algorithms and software tools developed for US based orthopaedic surgery navigation. In the second part of the paper are presented the algorithms and software tools developed for controlling a robotic manipulator, that can be used both in simulation and in a real scenario. The paper also presents the developed simulation scenario, for a surgical procedure in Hip Resurfacing, e.g., the first drill of the femur head. For navigation, the system, during surgery, acquires a 3D US bone surface from a sequence of US images. This bone surface will then be registered to the pre-operative bone model, for a precise knowledge of the bone position and orientation. This registration is performed in two steps. The first, a global registration before the surgical procedure, to exactly register the bone. The second is to locally register the femur, which is faster and more suitable for tracking the bone movements. The measured bone movement is used by the robot manipulator to update its drilling position and orientation.

Robotic motion compensation for bone movement, using ultrasound images

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a robotic motion compensation system, using ultrasound images, to assist orthopedic surgery. The robotic system can compensate for femur movements during bone drilling procedures. Although it may have other applications, the system was thought to be used in hip resurfacing (HR) prosthesis surgery to implant the initial guide tool. The system requires no fiducial markers implanted in the patient, by using only non-invasive ultrasound images. Design/methodology/approach – The femur location in the operating room is obtained by processing ultrasound (USA) and computer tomography (CT) images, obtained, respectively, in the intra-operative and pre-operative scenarios. During surgery, the bone position and orientation is obtained by registration of USA and CT three-dimensional (3D) point clouds, using an optical measurement system and also passive markers attached to the USA probe and to the drill. The system description, image processing, calibration procedures...

Evolving Fuzzy Uncalibrated Visual Servoing for Mobile Robots

In this paper, fuzzy models obtained on-line and off-line for uncalibrated visual servoing, are proposed and validated for an unicycle mobile robot. This approach will recursively update the inverse fuzzy model based only on measurements, at a given time instant. The uncalibrated approach does not require calibrated kinematic and camera models, as needed in classical visual servoing to obtain the Jacobian. Experimental results obtained in an unicycle mobile robot performing eye-in-hand visual servoing are used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach, when compared to the previous developed off-line learning.

ROBIHO – A Robot Companion for Elderly People’s Homes

In developed countries elderly people is gradually increasing. Society is abandoning their parents and/or gran-parents, and often are found dead at home without any aid or care. To reduce these problems, a robot was designed to assist the elderly in their homes. ROBIHO is an intelligent robot that has the ability to navigate in homes and monitor human daily routines. This robot is also a companion and enables communication with family, friends, health professionals and authorities. This paper presents the new social robotic system, ROBIHO and its technology.

Robotic System Navigation Developed for Hip Resurfacing Prosthesis Surgery

This paper discusses the design of a navigation system developed to assist surgeons in the procedures of Hip Resurfacing prosthesis surgeries. In conventional surgery, mechanical jigs are used to obtain a correct alignment for the metal prosthesis, however it is a very time consuming process. In order to solve this problem emerges a new robotic system, named HipRob. The system is composed by a pre-operative sub-system for planning the prosthesis correct alignment and a flexible robot to be co-manipulated by the surgeon during the drilling procedures on the femur head. The real-time navigation of this robotic system is based on the registration between the femur model, constructed from the CT scan, and the surface constructed with ultrasound images, acquired during the surgical procedures. Experimental results, performed in a femur phantom, show that the robot location errors are around 2 mm.

New Approach to the Open Loop Control for Surgical Robots Navigation

Robotic and computer-assisted technology are increasingly being developed for use in surgery to aid surgeons in providing more precision and accuracy, especially during procedures requiring fine movements. Moreover, reproducibility is another important aspect to be considered to achieve better results. This paper presents a navigation system developed to assist orthopaedic surgery with application in open loop control of the robots used for femur drilling procedures. Although it may have other applications, the system was thought to be used in Hip Resurfacing (HR) prosthesis surgery to implant the initial guide tool. The navigation system does not require any marker implanted in the patient, unlike current systems. The location of the bone in the operating room is obtained through the information from ultrasound (US) images and Computer Tomography (CT) images, obtained respectively in the intra-operative and pre-operative scenarios. During the surgery the bone position and orientation is obtained through a registration process between the US and CT, using an optical measurement system (Polaris) to measure the 3D position of passive markers attached to the US probe and to the drill. The system description, image processing, calibration procedures and results with real experiments are presented and described to illustrate the system in operation.

Towards a low-cost framework for Intelligent Robots

Intelligent Robots can take advantage of a distributed, web-based information system deployed in the cloud to perform high level tasks. This paper proposes a robotic control framework suited to be used by low-cost robots, performing teloperated and/or autonomous tasks. The first part is dedicated to the development of an Android based robot control framework. This framework connects to specific low-level controllers that were developed for multicopters, wheeled/tracked mobile robots. The second part is dedicated to “place” the Android based robot in the cloud. There, the robot can perform Cloud based highly automated cognitive tasks in order to optimize their use and take best advantage of previous knowledge models, e.g., objects databases or 3D world models. Also, the robot can be controlled remotely using a classical teleoperation mode, using wifi networks. First experiments are presented when a tracked robot is performing surveillance tasks, while its state can be changed to teleoperation/videoconferencing mode, while interacting with a reasoning engine in the Cloud.

A Survey on Biomedical Knowledge Representation for Robotic Orthopaedic Surgery

The paper presents a survey of the efforts and methods presented by the research community to represent knowledge to be used, in a machine readable format, in the biomedical field. From the surveyed ontologies, the base ontologies for the conceptual model of the Ontology for Robotic Orthopaedic Surgery (OROSU), are defined. Methods for merging the base ontologies to obtain the OROSU, are discussed, while the under development framework is briefly presented.

Towards a software tool for ultrasound guided robotic hip resurfacing surgery

This paper presents the integration between the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and the Point Cloud Library (PCL) to deliver a software tool (SWT) to robotic orthopedic surgery. The application that demonstrates the usefulness of the tool was developed for the registration of 2D ultrasound (US) images of the femur to 3D point clouds obtained from CT or US images, i.e., the 3D bone model. The surgery tackled is Hip Resurfacing of the femur, which needs a precise knowledge of the bone precision and orientation. The SWT developed takes advantage of the well known characteristics of IGSTK and the libraries from which it depends, e.g., OpenCV, ITK, VTK, etc, and the capabilities of the PCL library for point cloud processing and integration to OROCOS/ROS, the Open Robot Control Software Project. For the registration, during surgery, the SWT acquires a bone surface from a sequence of US images, in the 3D space. This bone surface will then be registered to the pre-operative bone model, for a precise knowledge of the bone position and orientation, allowing to automatise the procedure through a robotic manipulator.