The surgery includes robotic systems and image processing in order to interactively assist a surgeon in its planning and execution of surgical procedures.

The objective of this clinical robotic surgery is to contribute to enhancing the quality of care by limiting the operative trauma (smaller incisions and tissue decay …) for the benefit of the patient and society, and Agreement with medical ethics. Several types of surgery such as neurosurgery, orthopedics, microsurgery, laparoscopy in general surgery and cardiac surgery benefit from the contribution of robotics.

Specifically, robotic surgery covers the entire operating procedure since the acquisition and processing of data to the surgery and post-operative control.

Pre-operatively, it is modeled for each patient, the rigid bodies (such as bones) or deformable (such as the heart), targets of intervention. To do this, the specific modalities of medical imaging and information they provide are used. The anatomical structures discovered are then
used in the preparation of surgical planning and simulation. These two phases include the mechanical models of the robot to describe and simulate the movements, and eventually forces achievable.

This schedule is then correlated with the patient at the block, per-operative phase. The robotic system can provide active help in guiding, forcing the movement of the surgeon to achieve precisely the planned procedure (eg robot carrying guide needle biopsy in neurosurgery). In some cases, the
robot can act in self to achieve all or part of the operating procedure envisaged (eg active robot performing milling femur during the installation of prosthesis of hip).

In the case of remote robots for surgery, the surgeon, from a master console, has a larger vision of the body to operate, sometimes three-dimensional, and possibly enhanced overlay graphics organs modeled previously. The movements of the surgeon are filtered, reduced and transferred to the remote slave robot, which performs the surgery on the body (such as Intuitive Surgical robot used for cardiac bypass surgery at the hospital Broussais / Inria) . Beyond the improvement of medical robots invasive Atuel, micro-robots will in the future to deal damage without opening the patient.