Se Min Oh

A robot-assisted surgery system for spinal fusion

The goal of this work is to develop a robot-assisted surgery system for spinal fusion, which is composed of a robot, a surgical planning system, and an optical tracking system. The system plays roles of assisting surgeon for inserting a pedicle screw in spinal fusion. Compared to pure navigation systems as well as conventional methods for spinal fusion, it is able to achieve better accuracy through compensating for the portending movement of the surgical area. Furthermore, the robot can position and guide needles, drills, and other surgical instruments or conducts drilling/screwing directly. In preoperative surgery, the desired entry point, orientation, and depth of surgical tools for pedicle screw insertion are determined by the surgical planning system based on CT or MR images. Intra-operatively, the position information on the surgical instruments and the targeted surgical areas are obtained by the tracking system and, using that information, a robot conducts the preplanned operation depending on its role while compensating the movement of the surgical area. Two exemplary experiments employing the developed robot-assisted surgery system are conducted.

Active bending endoscope robot system for navigation through sinus area

This work introduces a new endoscope robot system for general sinus surgery. The proposed endoscope can be bent in accordance with a users intension at the time of inserting the endoscope into the sinus area, and it was designed to be bent up to 180 degrees and its diameter is about 4mm. The design of the proposed endoscope uses a spring backbone, which allows flexibility of the mechanism. A design method to determine design parameters for this device is proposed. The performance of the proposed system is verified by integration of the robot device and simulator.

Development of SPINEBOT for spine surgery

In most spine surgeries, the physician directly performs the surgical operation with help of specially designed surgical tools along with off-line CT images and possibly with fluoroscopic images that provide the on-line status of current surgical operation for patient However, the surgical procedure generally requires accurate operational skills and intuition of the physician. Sometimes, trifling errors or misjudgments during surgical operation could result in unrecoverable damages to patients. To cope with these problems, robotic technology has been incorporated into the surgical operations in various levels. In this paper, a robotic system for percutaneous spine surgery, called SPlNEBOT, is developed. The expected roles of SPINEBOT are to provide the guide for the K-wire, to help the physician to locate and orient the position of surgery more accurately, and to compensate for respiration movement of the patients body during operation. A preliminary experiment has been conducted with a mockup environment of surgical operation. The experimental results confirm that the SPINEBOT is not only able to guide by accurately pointing and orienting the specified location, but also successfully compensate the emulated respiratory movement of the patient.

ASC localization in noisy environment based on wireless sensor network

This study investigates indoor localization problem of robot or a customer at shopping mall environment. To improve the localization accuracy, a sensor fusion-based approach is employed, which combines data from ZigBee, odometry of active shopping cart (ASC), and QR marker. The proposed algorithm employs Gaussian probability estimation method and thus it is adaptive to localization problem even at noisy environment such as the shopping mall. To implement the localization service, an ASC which is equipped with motors for navigation, a laser sensor for tracking, and a tablet computer for human–computer interaction is designed. Through experimental work, we corroborate the feasibility of the proposed localization algorithms.