Development of a robot for surgery of temporal bone

Described was development of a robot for drill-outing the mastoid process, the first essential step purposing such otologic surgery of temporal bone as tympanoplasty, cochlear implantation and tumor resection of auditory nerve, etc. A model of the bone prototyped by CT 3D data (Ono and Co., Ltd., Tokyo) was used for getting the trace of the drill-outing procedure by an expert, and information of the trace and bone position was registered by STAMP (surface template-assisted marker positioning), which was then integrated with a navigation system 3D slicer (a free, open source software) with use of data from position sensors of optical Polaris (NDI, Canada) and magnetic Aurora (NDI) on the drill tip. The sensors were also usable for recording the trace after the surgery as a log by MRI. The robot system was made to have thus 3 parts of drill-outing, operative navigation and control unit based on anatomical information. The drill-outing mechanic was made to have 6 degrees of freedom. Comparison of logs of the procedure conducted in the phantom bone by the robot and by an otologic operator gave agreement within error of 0.9 mm. More mechanical preciseness was thought desirable for reproducible operation. (author)