A Novel Conceptual Design on Robotic Bone-Cutting Device Based on Kinematic Analysis: Toward Development of A Novel Robot-Assisted Total Knee Replacement Surgical System

Abstract

Total knee replacement surgery (TKR) is one of the most frequent orthopedic operations. The TKR surgeon requires bone cutting and surfacing processes at the femur and tibia bone to fit with the certain trigonometric shape of knee implants. In the traditional TKR procedure, several handheld cutting jigs are used with the vibrated saw. Therefore, the TKR surgery requires skilful surgeon and health care personals to perform a nice output surgery. Our study aims to develop a robotic bone-cutting device which has minimum degree-of-freedom (DOF) to perform the bone cutting and surfacing tasks instead of using specific jigs and unstable saw. The new design is based on our kinematic analysis on the bone shape which directly related to the knee implants. Therefore, the design is on using only 4 possible simple motions of cutting device to create the suitable shapes, these motions are (1) Tool rotate about a single axis, (2) Tool slide in and out for adjusting the depth of planes, (3) and (4) are for plane creating in similar way as an X-Y table motions. The study has delivered a novel design of the 4-DOF robotic bone-cutting device based on the tool rotation around the distal of bone as the 1st DOF, the tool sliding in and out as the 2nd DOF, and the tool motion on a plane as the 3rd and 4th DOFs. A full detail of study is described. A prototyped hardware is developed and validated on a series of phantom based demonstrations. The project is working toward the full development of a novel robot-assisted TKR surgical system.