Update: Toward image-guided robotic surgery: determining the intrinsic accuracy of the daVinci-S robot

Early in 2006, Intuitive Surgical (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) released their next generation robotic surgery system, the daVinci-S. While the S is an update on the da Vinci surgical system it has significantly different structures. This led to the belief that there might be differences in the accuracy and precision of the daVinci-S as compared to the daVinci "classic". In a previous study, we measured the accuracy of the daVinci "classic" to be 1.02 mm throughout its work volume (Kwartowitz et al. in Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg 1: 159-165, 2006) In this study we evaluated the accuracy of the daVinci-S using the same protocol as was used for the daVinci "classic". The localization error is found to be 1.05 mm, which is essentially the same as the measured error for the daVinci "classic". It is concluded that the daVinci-S is an appropriate localizer for a robotic image guided surgery (RIGS) system.