Interactive simulation of surgical needle insertion and steering

Abstract

We present algorithms for simulating and visualizing the insertion and steering of needles through deformable tissues for surgical training and planning. Needle insertion is an essential component of many clinical procedures such as biopsies, injections, neurosurgery, and brachytherapy cancer treatment. The success of these procedures depends on accurate guidance of the needle tip to a clinical target while avoiding vital tissues. Needle insertion deforms body tissues, making accurate placement difficult. Our interactive needle insertion simulator models the coupling between a flexible needle and deformable tissue. We introduce (1) a novel algorithm for local remeshing that quickly enforces the conformity of a tetrahedral mesh to a curvilinear needle path, enabling accurate computation of contact forces, (2) an efficient method for coupling a 3D finite element simulation with a 1D inextensible rod with stick-slip friction, and (3) optimizations that reduce the computation time for physically based simulations. We can realistically and interactively simulate needle insertion into a prostate mesh of 13,375 tetrahedra and 2,763 vertices at a 25 Hz frame rate on an 8-core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon PC. The simulation models prostate brachytherapy with needles of varying stiffness, steering needles around obstacles, and supports motion planning for robotic needle insertion.We evaluate the accuracy of the simulation by comparing against real-world experiments in which flexible, steerable needles were inserted into gel tissue phantoms.

Optimizing Voronoi Diagrams for Polygonal Finite Element Computations

“…These conventional elements are well established and allow for simple and efficient implementations. However, they require complex remeshing when it comes to adaptive refinement, merging, cutting, or fracturing, i.e., general topological changes of the simulation domain [26,27,46,45,8,44].…”

LQG-Based Planning, Sensing, and Control of Steerable Needles

“…We plan to address this issue in future work. We also plan to incorporate uncertainty introduced by tissue deformation using a physically accurate FEM simulator [6].…”

Robotic Needle Steering: Design, Modeling, Planning, and Image Guidance

“…Building on their prior work on simulation of rigid needles into deformable tissue [8,10,11], Alterovitz et al developed a simulation of bevel-tip steerable needles in 2D [6] and Chentanez et al developed a 3D simulation [14]. These simulations model the coupling between a steerable needle and deformable tissue using the finite element method (FEM) -a mathematical method based on continuum mechanics for modeling the deformations and motions of solids and fluids.…”

“…The simulations use novel re-meshing to ensure conformity of the mesh to the curvilinear needle path. Achieving a computationally efficient simulation is challenging; the FEM computation in [14] is parallelized over multiple cores of an 8-core 3.0 GHz PC and achieve a 25 Hz frame rate for a prostate mesh composed of 13,375 tetrahedra.…”