3D Robot Assisted Fracture Reduction

Reduction in femoral shaft fractures may be difficult to achieve with minimal invasive techniques. Malalignment and high intraoperative radiation exposures can result. Our hypothesis is that robot assisted fracture reduction may improve the quality of reduction while reducing the amount of radiation exposure. In this paper we present a telemanipulator system for the robot assisted reduction of femoral shaft fractures. The telemanipulated reposition is performed with a 2D input device with haptical feedback based on 3D imaging data which can be acquired intraoperatively. With this system, we performed a test series to measure achievable reposition accuracies on artificial broken human femur bones without soft tissues. Furthermore, we performed first tests for the 3D reposition on complete human legs. The experimental set-up and results are presented in this paper. We could show, that the 3D telemanipulated reposition of such fractures is possible yielding very good accuracies in an intuitive and efficient way. Robot assisted fracture reduction has the potential to improve the reposition accuracy and furthermore reduce the X-ray irradiation exposure to patient and OR staff.