Abstract
Due to an increased sitting time in work, lumbar disc disease is one of the most frequent diseases in modern days, and this occasionally requires surgery for treatment. Endoscopic disc surgery, one of the common disc surgeries, requires a process of inserting a guide needle to the target disc for which the insertion path is manually planned by drawing lines on the patient's skin while monitoring the fluoroscopic view of the lumbar. Such procedure inevitably exposes both surgeon and patient to the fluoroscopy radiation emitted from the c-arm for a long time. To reduce the radiation exposure time, this study proposes a computer assisted method of calculating the 3D guide needle path by using 2D c-arm images of the disc in 3 different angles. Additionally, a method of the guide robot control based on the 3D needle path was developed by implementing the Hand-eye Calibration method to calculate the transformation matrix between the c-arm and robot base coordinate systems. The proposed system was then tested for its accuracy.
