Computer-Aided Orthopaedic Surgery: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives

Introduced more than two decades ago, computer-aided orthopaedic surgery (CAOS) has emerged as a new and independent area, due to the importance of treatment of musculoskeletal diseases in orthopaedics and traumatology, increasing availability of different imaging modalities and advances in analytics and navigation tools. The aim of this chapter is to present the basic elements of CAOS devices and to review state-of-the-art examples of different imaging modalities used to create the virtual representations, of different position tracking devices for navigation systems, of different surgical robots, of different methods for registration and referencing, and of CAOS modules that have been realized for different surgical procedures. Future perspectives will be outlined. It is expected that the recent advancement on smart instrumentation, medical robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning techniques, in combination with big data analytics, may lead to smart CAOS systems and intelligent orthopaedics in the near future.