Needle-based interventions are pervasive treatments in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), which can be used in a number of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, including biopsy, radioactive seed implantation, delivery of therapeutic agents, and thermal therapy. Intra-operative medical imaging promises high precision and improved workflow for interventional procedures, by offering intuitive anatomic structure of the tissue in situ. Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) can provide high quality, real time, high soft tissue contrast imaging without ionizing radiation, and therefore is an ideal guidance tool for image-guided therapy (IGT). To date, a variety of robotic devices for image-guided interventional procedures have been developed such as these described in [1–4]. However, most of these devices are driven manually or by the actuators that are not compatible with MRI, and thus not suitable for MRI-guided therapy.
In this study, we designed and evaluated a compact, reconfigurable MRI-compatible needle driver, using modular design approach, to...
