Praxiteles: a miniature bone-mounted robot for minimal access total knee arthroplasty.

We have been working to develop a compact, accurate, safe, and easy-to-use surgical robot for minimally invasive total knee arthroplasty (TKA). The goal of our bone-mounted robot, named Praxiteles, is to precisely position a surgical bone-cutting guide in the appropriate planes surrounding the knee, so that the surgeon can perform the planar cuts manually using the guide. The robot architecture is comprised of 2 motorized degrees of freedom (DoF) whose axes of rotation are arranged in parallel, and are precisely aligned to the implant cutting planes with a 2 DoF adjustment mechanism. Two prototypes have been developed and tested on saw bones and cadavers--an initial one for open TKA surgery and a new version for MIS TKA, which mounts on the side of the knee. A novel bone-milling technique is also presented that uses passive guide and a side milling tool. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.