User friendly graphical user interface for workflow management during navigated robotic-assisted keyhole neurosurgery

Minimally-invasive neurosurgery requires careful pre-operative planning of trajectories prior to the execution of the surgery. This work was developed within the EU project ROBOCAST, which aims at developing an integrated solution for advanced planning and intra-operative navigation of robot-assisted neurosurgical procedures. A combination of three robots offering a large working volume with high local precision and accuracy, together with an innovative flexible probe allows for research towards novel surgical procedures such as Multi-Target Treatment procedures. In the recent years, the research community dealing with intra-operative navigation systems has identified the need for analysis of surgical workflow and context-sensitive user interfaces in the OR. In this work, we present our work-in-progress on a user-friendly user interface, which intra-operatively guides the surgeon through the execution of the pre-operative plan in form of a sequential workflow wizard. Each step of the workflow spawns a window with clear visual and verbal instructions while a state-machine in the background controls whether the correct sequence of actions is performed and which workflow transitions are allowed. Therefore, the surgeon is optimally guided through the workflow, allowing him to focus on the medical procedure at hand. The integration of further components from our overall system into the Touchscreen user interface guarantees that user input is correctly propagated within the system and that the current workflow step and surgical activity drive the internal behavior of the system, making our system partly context-aware.     «

Minimally-invasive neurosurgery requires careful pre-operative planning of trajectories prior to the execution of the surgery. This work was developed within the EU project ROBOCAST, which aims at developing an integrated solution for advanced planning and intra-operative navigation of robot-assisted neurosurgical procedures. A combination of three robots offering a large working volume with high local precision and accuracy, together with an innovative flexible probe allows for research towards...     »