Towards Design and Development of a Concentric Tube Steerable Drilling Robot for Creating S-shape Tunnels for Pelvic Fixation Procedures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel steerable drilling robot designed to create S-shaped trajectories in pelvic surgeries, aiming to improve screw placement accuracy and reduce complications.

Contribution

The paper presents the design and development of a 4-DoF concentric tube steerable drilling robot specifically for pelvic fixation procedures, enabling complex curved drilling paths.

Findings

Successfully created S-shaped drilling trajectories in simulated bone phantoms.

Demonstrated potential to improve screw placement accuracy in pelvic surgeries.

Reduced need for repeated X-ray imaging during procedures.

Abstract

Current pelvic fixation techniques rely on rigid drilling tools, which inherently constrain the placement of rigid medical screws in the complex anatomy of pelvis. These constraints prevent medical screws from following anatomically optimal pathways and force clinicians to fixate screws in linear trajectories. This suboptimal approach, combined with the unnatural placement of the excessively long screws, lead to complications such as screw misplacement, extended surgery times, and increased radiation exposure due to repeated X-ray images taken ensure to safety of procedure. To address these challenges, in this paper, we present the design and development of a unique 4 degree-of-freedom (DoF) pelvic concentric tube steerable drilling robot (pelvic CT-SDR). The pelvic CT-SDR is capable of creating long S-shaped drilling trajectories that follow the natural curvatures of the pelvic anatomy. The performance of the pelvic CT-SDR was thoroughly evaluated through several S-shape drilling experiments in simulated bone phantoms.