Developing and Testing of the Cyber Surgery NeRo Experiment is Complete
After an extensive process of evaluation, development and testing, the ESMERA – NeRo Project for a high precision surgical robotic assistant for scoliosis procedures has been successfully completed.
ESMERA (European SMEs Robotics Applications) promotes the application of robotic technologies developed for industrial challenges, including Health Tech, set by key European companies. To unlock the innovation potential of these robotics SMEs, ESMERA provides mentoring and financial support in addition to an environment for developing, testing and demonstrating new robotic technologies. In November 2020, Cyber Surgery was chosen by ESMERA for its NeRo Experiment, in order to adapt their Robotic Assistant for Spinal Procedures to address very specific needs in the Healthcare market.
The NeRo Experiment: Scoliosis Surgical Robotic Assistant
The Health Tech challenge presented was focused on adapting the existing Cyber Surgery robotic spinal surgery technology to address scoliosis procedures. Since average spinal surgeries only involve 2 or 3 vertebrae, Cyber Surgery had to design and develop new tracking technology for scoliosis interventions where complicated trajectories must be reached and high accuracy levels must be maintained.
In order to complete these goals, tasks related to research, specification, design and simulation were performed such as: Defining the specifications of the tracker attributes and a new tracker design to be implemented. Then, validation of the tracker design was performed in a simulation environment. Additionally, the tracker was validated by performing a test using a plastic phantom and a tracker manufactured by additive manufacturing. In order to take the tracker development to level TRL7, the software developments associated with using it in the robot and validation in a real scenario was performed.
Watch a summary of the Phases of the Cyber Surgery ESMERA NeRo Project here.
Cyber Surgery is proud to have participated in this crucial surgical robotics challenge and will continue on our path towards developing groundbreaking Health Tech solutions.
