A process is provided to recover a bone-to-image, image-to-system, and/or bone-to-system registration, when bone movement occurs during a computer-assisted surgical procedure. The process may be implemented with a computer-assisted surgical system. Examples of surgical systems that can exploit the recovery process illustratively include a 1-6 degree of freedom hand-held surgical system, a navigated surgical system, a serial-chain manipulator system, a parallel robotic system, or a master-slave robotic system.
