Requirements elicitation for robotic and computer-assisted minimally invasive surgery

The robotic surgical systems and computer-assisted technologies market has seen impressive growth over the last decades, but uptake by end-users is still scarce. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive and informed list of the end-user requirements for the development of new generation robot- and computer-assisted surgical systems and the methodology for eliciting them. The requirements were elicited, in the frame of the EU project SMARTsurg, by conducting interviews on use cases of chosen urology, cardiovascular and orthopaedics procedures, tailored to provide clinical foundations for scientific and technical developments. The structured interviews resulted in detailed requirement specifications which are ranked according to their priorities. Paradigmatic surgical scenarios support the use cases

Gender and Side-to-Side Differences of Femoral Condyles Morphology: Osteometric Data from 360 Caucasian Dried Femori

The purpose of the present study was to conduct direct measurements in a large sample of dried femori in order to record certain morphometric parameters of the femoral condyles and determine whether there are gender and side differences. Three hundred sixty (Greek) Caucasian dried femori (180 left and 180 right), from 192 males and 168 females, were measured using a digital caliper. The mean age was 67.52 years. The mean bicondylar width of the femur was 8.86 cm ± 0.42 cm in men and 7.85 cm ± 0.30 cm in women (<0.01). The relative values for the medial condylar depth were 6.11 cm ± 0.34 cm and 5.59 cm ± 0.29 cm (<0.05); for the lateral condylar depth were 6.11 cm ± 0.33 cm and 5.54 cm ± 0.21 cm (<0.01); for the intercondylar width were 2.20 cm ± 0.18 cm and 1.87 cm ± 0.10 cm (<0.001); for the intercondylar depth were 2.78 cm ± 0.16 cm and 2.37 cm ± 0.12 cm (<0.001). No significant side-to-side difference was observed in any parameter. The femoral condyles differences in anatomy between genders might be useful to the design of total knee prostheses. The contralateral healthy side can be safely used for preoperative templating since there were no significant side differences