Robot-Assisted Surgical Platform for Controlled Bone Drilling: Experiments on Temperature Monitoring for Assessment of Thermal Bone Necrosis

One of the most serious problems encountered during bone-drilling is the generation of heat, as the increase in temperature of the drilling site may result in thermal injury due to bone necrosis phenomena. So developing a method for predicting, controlling and preventing bone ischemic states during surgical interventions would be a great improvement, regarding adequate prostheses fixation and patient recovery. Implementing a predictive equivalent thermal circuit for necrosis assessment involves performing a number of experimental measurements for model parameter identification.

Thereby, several drilling experiments on bovine bone have been conducted, using a Robot-Assisted Surgical platform developed at CEIT, where the temperature evolution of the drilled area has been monitored immediately post-drilling, using Infrared thermography. The maximum temperature values reached for different sets of machining parameters have been established and natural convective cooling patterns have been characterized by obtaining an average value of the thermal time constant of the system.