Error analysis in cranial neuronavigation

Neuronavigation systems are now an important component of many modern neurosurgical treatment strategies. Their support facilities intraoperative orientation and makes neurosurgical operations more precise and less traumatic. Computer-aided neurosurgery is definitively not a temporary fashionable phenomenon, the concept of neuronavigation is here to stay. This report summarizes a ten-years-long experience and presents an error analysis of 108 failures (12.4 %) in a total of 874 image-guided cranial neurosurgical procedures with an arm-linked (mechanical) system and two different infrared-light emitting (optical) systems. The application of neuronavigation incurs multiple reasons for pitfalls because of the complex man-machine interface. Principally, we have to differentiate two types of errors: "machine made errors" due to soft- or hardware failure and "man made errors" generally, due to inadequate handling of the navigation system. The error analysis demonstrated that the so-called human interface plays the main role causing a high error rate.