Development of a compact continuum tubular robotic system for nasopharyngeal biopsy

Abstract

Traditional posterior nasopharyngeal biopsy using a flexible nasal endoscope has the risks of abrasion and injury to the nasal mucosa and thus causing trauma to the patient. Recently, a new class of robots known as continuum tubular robots (CTRs) provide a novel solution to the challenge with miniaturized size, curvilinear maneuverability, and capability of avoiding collision within the nasal environment. This paper presents a compact CTR which is 35 cm in total length, 10 cm in diameter, 2.15 kg in weight, and easy to be integrated with a robotic arm to perform more complicated operations. Structural design, end-effector design, and workspace analysis are described in detail. In addition, teleoperation of the CTR using a haptic input device is developed for position control in 3D space. Moreover, by integrating the robot with three electromagnetic tracking sensors, a navigation system together with a shape reconstruction algorithm is developed. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to test the functionality of the proposed prototype; experiment results show that under teleoperation, the system has an accuracy of 2.20 mm in following a linear path, an accuracy of 2.01 mm in following a circular path, and a latency time of 0.1 s. It is also found that the proposed shape reconstruction algorithm has a mean error of around 1 mm along the length of the tubes. Besides, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed robotic system being applied to posterior nasopharyngeal biopsy are demonstrated by a cadaver experiment. The proposed robotic system holds promise to enhance clinical operation in transnasal procedures.

SmartArm: Integration and validation of a versatile surgical robotic system for constrained workspaces

“…The objective is to demonstrate that, with a given amount of training, a medically untrained person can perform endonasal suturing inside the endonasal space with accuracy and speed comparable to manual suturing by surgeons. This is at the forefront of current research and considerably more complex to what has been achieved in the related literature …”

“…The main goal of this work is to demonstrate that the proposed robotic system can be used for the desired application in a narrow workspace and, in fact, can achieve performance similar to that achieved manually by surgeons. The validation of our system is considerably more complex than that achieved in the literature, which to date has been limited to reachability tests or biopsies in the endonasal workspace …”

“…The validation of our system is considerably more complex than that achieved in the literature, which to date has been limited to reachability tests or biopsies in the endonasal workspace. [9][10][11][12]22 2 MATERIALS AND METHODS…”

Motion planning of continuum tubular robots based on centerlines extracted from statistical atlas

“…The Jacobian matrix can then be solved by following the method introduced in [27] and the inverse kinematics can be solved through an iterative procedure given an initial estimation and an updating rule based on the Jacobian matrix.…”

Hysteresis analysis of a notched continuum manipulator driven by tendon

“…Some researchers adopted overall modelling to map driving force and deformation using diverse theorems: energy method such as the principle of virtue power and the transformation of potential energy (Tatlicioglu et al, 2007;Rone and Ben-Tzvi, 2014), Cosserat rod theory (Jones et al 2009;Rucker and Iii, 2011;Giorelli et al, 2012), constant curvature assumption (Camarillo et al, 2008;York et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2017), etc. Moreover, some researchers established a unit model first and then built an integrate deformation model considering unit kinematics and mechanics character (Du et al, 2015b;Kato et al, 2015).…”