The Use of Industrial Robot Arms for High Precision Patient Positioning

Abstract

The Indiana University Cyclotron Facility (IUCF) is in the process of designing and building the Midwest Proton Radiation Institute (MPRI) [1]. The design process includes the development of several patient treatment systems. This paper discusses the use of two such systems that provide for the high precision positioning of a patient. They are the Patient Positioner System and the X-ray system. The Patient Positioner System positions an immobilized patient on a support device to a treatment position based on a prescribed Treatment Plan. The X-ray system uses an industrial robot arm to position a Digital Radiography Panel to acquire an X-ray image to verify the location of the prescribed treatment volume in a patient by comparing the acquired images with reference images obtained from the patient's Treatment plan.

Experiences with an application of industrial robotics for accurate patient positioning in proton radiotherapy

“…The solution to the problem of what to use for patient positioning devices was to design a novel system around commercial industrial robot arms with six degrees of freedom (three translational directions and three angles, pitch, roll and yaw) (2). This idea had been pursued recently to varying extents in proton therapy centres at iThemba Labs in South Africa (3) and at the Centre de Protontherapie d'Orsay in France (4,5).…”

Using an external registration system for daily patient repositioning in protontherapy

“…In this last equation, T pat→target results from the registration phase, T target→polbase is directly measured by NDI Polaris R , T polbase→beam is a fixed geometrical transform already used in (6) and T beam→pat d is the desired position provided by the the treatment planning. Again, due to combined geometrical errors in (3) - (7), the computed robot displacement may result in a non zero error.…”

Patient positioning in the proton radiotherapy era

“…One of these has fixed horizontal beam lines, and the other two have gantries that rotate 360° around the isocentre. A novel positioning system has been designed based on commercial industrial robot arms with six degrees of freedom (three translational directions and three angles, pitch, roll and yaw) [ 6 ].…”