Data and code from: A minimally-invasive robotic spinal surgical system for anterior lumbar nerve decompression

Patients with lumbar degenerative disease, which is caused by nerves in
spinal canal being compressed by pathological tissues, should have a
surgery, i.e. lumbar nerve decompression in spine surgery, to relieve the
pain. While the anterior decompression approach, which has been widely
used, exhibits notable advantages such as reduced bleeding and shorter
postoperative hospitalization stay as compared with the posterior
decompression approach, patients could still suffer from incomplete
decompression due to various shortcomings of the instruments, including
limited or occluded view on the posterior area of the spine. In
particular, these instruments are straight and rigid with no dexterity at
the distal, posing challenges in excising the degenerative tissues. In
this work, we propose the first robotic surgical system for lumbar nerve
decompression. This study offers a new specialized robotic system to
perform surgeries in narrow, confined and tortuous anatomies.