ROBOTIZED NEUROSURGERY - STATE-OF-THE-ART AND FUTURE-DEVELOPMENTS

Neurosurgery is by excellence afield of application for robots, based on multimodal image guidance Specific motorized tools have been alread y developped and routinely applied in stereotaxy to position ii probe holder or in conventional neurosurgery to hold a microscope oriented t owards a given target. The potentialities of these approaches have tri ggered industrial developments currently commercially available These systems use data bases, primarily, coming from multimodal numerical im ages from X-ray radiology to magnetic resonance imaging. These spatial ly encoded data are transfered through digital networks to workstation s where images can be processed and surgical procedures are preplanned then transferred to the robotic systems to which they are connected. We have been using a stereotactic robot since 1989 and a microscope ro bot since 1995 in various surgical routine procedures The future of th ese applications mainly rely on the technical progress in informatics, about image recognition to adapt the preplanning to the actual surgic al situation to correct brain shifts for instance about image fusion, integrated knowledge such such as brain atlases, as well as virtual re ality. The future developments, covering surgical procedure, research and teaching, will sure be far beyond our wildest expectations.