• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.8-15
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• 2022

In this paper, we proposed the method of virtual reality-based surgical navigation to reproduce the pre-planned position and angle of the pedicle screw in spinal fusion surgery. The goal of the proposed method is to quantitatively save the surgical plan by applying a virtual guide coordinate system and reproduce it in the surgical process through virtual reality. In the surgical planning step, the insertion position and angle of the pedicle screw are planned and stored based on the virtual guide coordinate system. To implement the virtual reality-based surgical navigation, a vision tracking system is applied to set the patient coordinate system and paired point-based patient-to-image registration is performed. In the surgical navigation step, the surgical plan is reproduced by quantitatively visualizing the pre-planned insertion position and angle of the pedicle screw using a virtual guide coordinate system. We conducted phantom experiment to verify the error between the surgical plan and the surgical navigation, the experimental result showed that target registration error was average 1.47 ± 0.64 mm when using the proposed method. We believe that our method can be used to accurately reproduce a pre-established surgical plan in spinal fusion surgery.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.807-813
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• 2011

High precision of planning in the preoperative phase can contribute to increase operational safety during computer-aided spinal fusion surgery, which requires extreme caution on the part of the surgeon, due to the complexity and delicacy of the procedure. In this paper, an advanced preoperative planning framework for spinal fusion is presented. The framework is based on spinal pedicle data obtained from CT (Computed Tomography) images, and provides optimal insertion trajectories and pedicle screw sizes. The proposed approach begins with safety margin estimation for each potential insertion trajectory that passes through the pedicle volume, followed by procedures to collect a set of insertion trajectories that satisfy operation safety objectives. The radius of a pedicle screw was chosen as 70% of the pedicle radius. This framework has been tested on 68 spinal pedicles of 8 patients requiring spinal fusion. It was successfully applied, resulting in an average success rate of 100% and a final safety margin of $2.44{\pm}0.51mm$.