Robotic stereotaxic surgery

Missing your stereotaxic brain targets is nothing short of a disaster leaving you with wasted animals and wasted time. The traditional ‘manual’ stereotaxic approach is highly dependent on operator-skill and easily distorted by reading-errors on mechanical-axis scales, compounded by common-place failures to compensate target trajectories with skull alignment correction.

Intelligent, robot-assisted stereotaxic surgery and micro-injection

Using approaches similar to those employed in human neurosurgery, it’s now possible to substantially increase implant target accuracy and to automate your craniotomy drilling and micro-injections in a range of laboratory animals.

• Stereotaxic atlas integrated - 3-axis robot with error correction for head tilt, yaw and roll to ensure the best possible surgical target accuracy and reliability.
• Avoid human errors - save time and hit your targets with reliability.
• Surgery planning simplified - brain position is shown in relation to skull features in 3D. Freedom to scale atlas in all 3 axes to take account of animals differing from the atlas average. Custom altases can be integrated.
• Intuitive navigation - point and click at your targets, with single and double angle adjustment.
• Automatic drill-stop - impedance-based feedback to detect brain height. No bleeding , no mishaps, faster than humans - watch the video of a perfect cranial window procedure completed in under 12 mins! Published paper here.
• Synchronized micro-injector & drill - no tool change required - ideal for optogenetics.
• Stereo-Vision - smart bregma finder to avoid parallax error when locating bregma for best precision.
• High-throughput - savable sequences to run on a batch of animals, each individually error-corrected
• Joystick controlled - optimal for asceptic technique and surgery can be performed on video-feed from surgery microscope.
• Reduced training burden - lowered skills barrier since the robot has steady ‘hands' and is already an expert at error-corrected stereotaxic surgery!