title: Error analysis in cranial neuronavigation.
abstract: Neuronavigation systems are now an important component of many modern neurosurgical treatment strategies. Their support facilities intraoperative orientation and makes neurosurgical operations more precise and less traumatic. Computer-aided neurosurgery is definitively not a temporary fashionable phenomenon, the concept of neuronavigation is here to stay. This report summarizes a ten-years-long experience and presents an error analysis of 108 failures (12.4 %) in a total of 874 image-guided cranial neurosurgical procedures with an arm-linked (mechanical) system and two different infrared-light emitting (optical) systems. The application of neuronavigation incurs multiple reasons for pitfalls because of the complex man-machine interface. Principally, we have to differentiate two types of errors: "machine made errors" due to soft- or hardware failure and "man made errors" generally, due to inadequate handling of the navigation system. The error analysis demonstrated that the so-called human interface plays the main role causing a high error rate.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurosurgery, University of Technology Aachen, Aachen, Germany. spetzger@nz.ukl.uni-freiburg.de
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Spetzger
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hubbe
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Struffert
authors.forename: M H T
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Reinges
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Krings
authors.forename: G A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Krombach
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zentner
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Gilsbach
authors.forename: H S
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Stiehl
mesh_terms: D015982:Bias; D001921:Brain / Q000601:surgery*; D004868:Equipment Failure; D006801:Humans; D007432:Intraoperative Period; D019300:Medical Errors; D019635:Neurosurgical Procedures / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D014584:User-Computer Interface