ELCANO

Integrated and robotic solution for mass interventions

Financed by:

File number: IPT-2012-0508-300000

Program: National / INNPACTO

Partners

• Grupo Egile

• Ceit

Summary

The objective of this project is to develop an integrated and robotic solution for minimally invasive spinal procedures. For this, three technologies will be integrated:

• Virtual intervention planning: a software program that is capable of extracting information from the patient's history from the clinic / hospital PACS system, reconstructing a virtual patient model based on the available CT images that will allow the surgeon to plan the intervention from his office. Once planning is complete, it will be sent to the operating room.

• Navigation / tracking system: a device installed in the operating room that is capable of monitoring the real position of the patient in real time so that the real patient's disposition can be correlated with the virtual model reconstructed with the planner.

• Collaborative Robotic Assistant (COBOT) for aid in surgery: a robotic system capable of receiving information from the planner. This robot is capable of configuring active movement restrictions (fixtures) and working collaboratively with the surgeon (COllaborative roBOT) to facilitate the intervention while limiting movements to prevent access to risk areas.

Due to the potential market offered by fusion interventions, the design of the solution will be based on fusion interventions instrumented with transpedicular screws, and the concept can be applied to other types of interventions such as lateral interbody fusion arthrodesis ALIF or TLIF.

The result of the project will be a universal robotic “base” prototype to serve as a guide for such interventions with a hands-on concept (guiding the surgeon), and a more advanced second that can support “mechanized” tasks under a haptic concept.

Ceit's role in the project

Within the Elcano project, Ceit coordinated and led the definition and implementation of the Elcano robotic surgery architecture

This system is made up of:

• A planner software (viewIT-spine) that loads medical image files (DICOM) from the scanner. This planner allows the doctor to define the position and orientation of the screws that he wants to insert into the patient.

• A viewIT-spine software module runs in real time in the operating room to detect the patient's position.

• Finally, two robotic assistants were assembled to be used as collaborative robots (COBOT).

  • Laboratory prototype, based on 7 degrees of freedom Mitsubishi-PA10 anthropomorphic robot.
    
    

  • Operating room prototype, based on Staübli TX40 anthropomorphic robot with 6 degrees of freedom.
    
    

  • Ceit also actively collaborated in the testing campaign. The previous photo shows the prototype ready to carry out a test on a corpse at the Jesús Usón minimally invasive surgery center (Cáceres)