Surgical robotics: An introduction

Surgical robots assisting surgeons during operations are being used in selected medical fields like neurosurgery, orthopaedics and endoscopy. In an introductory part, the authors present a workflow for robot assisted surgery, which includes the steps: image data acquisition, image processing, surgical planning and the actual robot assisted intraoperative transposition. Each step of the workflow comprises different computer aided methods and apparatuses, which are presented in this paper. The following part focuses on different mechanical set-ups and various application fields for surgical robots. They include neurosurgery, orthopaedic surgery, radiosurgery and radiotherapy, prostatectomy, endoscopy, laparoscopy, cardiac surgery and craniofacial surgery.