Ontologies applied to surgical robotics

Abstract

The paper presents current efforts and methods presented by the research community to represent knowledge to be used, in a machine readable format, for surgical robotics. Ontologies from the medical field are surveyed, to be aligned with robotic ontologies to obtain proper surgical robotic ontologies. The later, are valuable tools that combine surgical protocols, machine protocols, anatomical ontologies, and medical image data. An orthopaedic robot surgical ontology, for knowledge representation, is presented and briefly discussed. The system based on ontologies uses dedicated algorithms, devices and merges existing medical and robotic ontologies to obtain a common ontology framework.