Knowledge representation applied to robotic orthopedic surgery

• A review on biomedical and robotic ontologies.
• Ontologies applied to robotic surgery.
• Ontology based task definition and reasoning applied to Hip Surgery surgical procedures.

In this paper the efforts and methods used in the past years are presented to represent knowledge in the biomedical field and to obtain a conceptual model of the Ontology for Robotic Orthopedic Surgery (OROSU). This model is proposed in this paper to represent the knowledge to be used, in a machine readable format, during surgeries. Since ontologies in the biomedical filed are relatively mature and have been widely used, this is a perfect field to show the interest of using ontologies to represent robotic knowledge and its use, directly with humans (surgeons, nurses, technicians, and so on). From the biomedical ontologies that already exist, the conceptual model of OROSU is defined. The base ontologies were merged by the authors to obtain the OROSU ontology, and applied to Hip Surgery surgical procedures. It was then implemented using the KnowRob framework. Results on tasks definitions and reasoning using the presented ontology showed its usability, for Hip Surgery surgical procedures.