Robot-Assisted Surgery at the Lateral Skull Base

Abstract

Introduction: Recently there has been a comeback of improved small-size robotic devices for intraoperative use, especially for skull base procedures. The current state of research is that experimental systems can perform highly precise boreholes, for example, for a cochlear implant operation. The necessary surgical accuracy for the ideal opening of the cochlea is 0.3 to 0.5 mm. Here we present the first results of our work group for performing a mechatronically accomplished drilling of the mastoid and cochleostomy.