This paper presents the design and control of an MRI-compatible 1-DOF needle driver robot and its precise position control using pneumatic actuation with long transmission lines. MRI provides superior image quality compared to other imaging modalities such as CT or ultrasound, but imposes severe limitations on the material and actuator choice (to prevent image distortion) due to its strong magnetic field. We are primarily interested in developing a pneumatically actuated breast biopsy robot with a large force bandwidth and precise targeting capability during radio-frequency ablation (RFA) of breast tumor, and exploring the possibility of using long pneumatic transmission lines from outside the MRI room to the device in the magnet to prevent any image distortion whatsoever. This paper presents a model of the entire pneumatic system. The pneumatic lines are approximated by a first order system with time delay, because its dynamics are governed by the telegraph equation with varying coefficients and boundary conditions, which cannot be solved precisely. The slow response of long pneumatic lines and valve subsystems make position control challenging. This is further compounded by the presence of non-uniform friction in the device. Sliding mode control (SMC) was adopted, where friction was treated as an uncertainty term to drive the system onto the sliding surface. Three different controllers were designed, developed, and evaluated to achieve precise position control of the RFA probe. Experimental results revealed that all SMCs gave satisfactory performance with long transmission lines. We also performed several experiments with a 3-DOF fiber-optic force sensor attached to the needle driver to evaluate the performance of the device in the MRI under continuous imaging.
Surgical accuracy of the hand-held instruments depends on the active compensation of disturbance and tremor. Physiological tremor is one of the main causes for imprecision in micro-surgery procedures. One of the popular tremor compensation methods is based on weighted-frequency Fourier linear combiner (WFLC) algorithm, that can adapt to the changes in frequency as well as amplitude of the tremor signal. WLFC estimates the dominant frequency and the amplitude. For the case of tremor with frequency variation or comprising of two or three frequencies close in spectral domain, the WFLC performance is degraded. In this paper, we present a bandlimited multiple Fourier linear combiner that can track the modulated signals with multiple frequency components. We also discuss the tremor sensing with accelerometers. Using the proposed algorithm the drift caused by the accelerometers is also eliminated. The proposed filter is tested in real-time for 1-DOF cancellation of tremor.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides superior soft-tissue contrast in cancer diagnosis compared to other imaging modalities. However, the strong magnetic field inside the MRI bore along with limited scanner bore size poses significant challenges. Since current approaches in breast biopsy using MR images is primarily a blind targeting approach, it is necessary to develop a MRI-compatible robot that can avoid multiple needle insertions into the breast tissue. This MRI-compatible robotic system could potentially lead to improvement in the targeting accuracy and reduce sampling errors. A master-slave surgical system has been developed comprising of a MRI-compatible slave robot which consists of one piezo motor and five pneumatic cylinders connected by long pneumatic transmission lines. The slave robot follows the configuration of the master robot, which provides an intuitive manipulation interface for the physician and operates inside the MRI bore to adjust the needle position and orientation and perform needle insertion task. Based on the MRI experiments using the slave robot, there was no significant distortion in the images and hence the slave robot can be safely operated inside the MRI with minimal loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Ex vivo and in vivo experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the master-slave surgical system.
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