TY - JOUR
T1 - A Concentric Tube Steerable Drilling Robot for Minimally Invasive Spinal Fixation of Osteoporotic Vertebrae
AU - Sharma, Susheela
AU - Mohanraj, Tarunraj G.
AU - Amadio, Jordan P.
AU - Khadem, Mohsen
AU - Alambeigi, Farshid
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health under Award R21EB030796.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1964-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2023/10/20
Y1 - 2023/10/20
N2 - Spinal fixation with rigid pedicle screws have shown to be an effective treatment for many patients. However, this surgical option has been proved to be insufficient and will eventually fail for patients experiencing osteoporosis. This failure is mainly attributed to the lack of dexterity in the existing rigid drilling instruments and the complex anatomy of vertebrae, forcing surgeons to implant rigid pedicle screws within the osteoporotic regions of anatomy. To address this problem, in this paper, we present the design, fabrication, and evaluation of a unique flexible yet structurally strong concentric tube steerable drilling robot (CT-SDR). The CT-SDR is capable of drilling smooth and accurate curved trajectories through hard tissues without experiencing buckling and failure; thus enabling the use of novel flexible pedicle screws for the next generation of spinal fixation procedures. Particularly, by decoupling the control of bending and insertion degrees of freedom (DoF) of the CT-SDR, we present a robotic system that (i) is intuitive to steer as it does not require an on-the-fly control algorithm for the bending DoF, and (ii) is able to address the contradictory requirements of structural stiffness and dexterity of a flexible robot interacting with the hard tissue. The robust and repeatable performance of the proposed CT-SDR have been experimentally evaluated by conducting various drilling procedures on simulated bone materials and animal bone samples. Experimental results indicate drilling times as low as 35 seconds for curved trajectories with 41 mm length and remarkable steering accuracy with a maximum 2% deviation error.
AB - Spinal fixation with rigid pedicle screws have shown to be an effective treatment for many patients. However, this surgical option has been proved to be insufficient and will eventually fail for patients experiencing osteoporosis. This failure is mainly attributed to the lack of dexterity in the existing rigid drilling instruments and the complex anatomy of vertebrae, forcing surgeons to implant rigid pedicle screws within the osteoporotic regions of anatomy. To address this problem, in this paper, we present the design, fabrication, and evaluation of a unique flexible yet structurally strong concentric tube steerable drilling robot (CT-SDR). The CT-SDR is capable of drilling smooth and accurate curved trajectories through hard tissues without experiencing buckling and failure; thus enabling the use of novel flexible pedicle screws for the next generation of spinal fixation procedures. Particularly, by decoupling the control of bending and insertion degrees of freedom (DoF) of the CT-SDR, we present a robotic system that (i) is intuitive to steer as it does not require an on-the-fly control algorithm for the bending DoF, and (ii) is able to address the contradictory requirements of structural stiffness and dexterity of a flexible robot interacting with the hard tissue. The robust and repeatable performance of the proposed CT-SDR have been experimentally evaluated by conducting various drilling procedures on simulated bone materials and animal bone samples. Experimental results indicate drilling times as low as 35 seconds for curved trajectories with 41 mm length and remarkable steering accuracy with a maximum 2% deviation error.
U2 - 10.1109/TBME.2023.3272306
DO - 10.1109/TBME.2023.3272306
M3 - Article
C2 - 37130252
SN - 0018-9294
VL - 70
SP - 3017
EP - 3027
JO - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
IS - 11
ER -