Robot-Bone Attachment Device for Robot-Assisted Percutaneous Bone Fragment Manipulation

The treatment of joint-fractures is a common task in orthopaedic surgery causing considerable health costs and patient disabilities. Percutaneous techniques have been developed to mitigate the problems related to open surgery (e.g. soft tissue damage), although their application to joint-fractures is limited by the sub-optimal intra-operative imaging (2D-fluoroscopy) and by the high forces involved. Our earlier research toward improving percutaneous reduction of intra-articular fractures has resulted in the creation of a robotic system prototype, i.e. RAFS (Robot-Assisted Fracture Surgery) system.
We propose a robot-bone attachment device for percutaneous bone manipulation, which can be anchored to the bone fragment through one small incision, ensuring the required stability and reducing the “biological cost” of the procedure. The device has been evaluated through the reduction of 9 distal femur fractures on human cadavers using the RAFS system.