IEEE ICRA 2012 Needle Steering Workshop

Steerable Needles as Surgical Robots

Pierre E. Dupont1,2

1 Children's Hospital, Boston

2 Harvard Medical School

Abstract

At the first needle steering workshop in 2008, I shared my group’s vision of transforming steerable needles into ultra-minimally invasive surgical robots. Our goal was to create a technology that would enable the needle’s shape to be actively controlled along its entire length. Such a device would be able to enter a body lumen by steering either through tissue or through a body orifice. Once inside the body lumen, the needle’s proximal portion could remain relatively fixed while its distal portion would manipulate tools within the lumen to perform the surgery. As a candidate technology, we had begun constructing needles from the concentric combination of pre-curved elastic tubes. The shape of such a needle as well as its tip position and orientation can be actively controlled by relative rotation and translation of the tubes at their proximal ends. In the intervening years, my team has made substantial progress in developing concentric tube robot technology for use as steerable needle surgical robots. Our accomplishments include (1) developing general design principles for these robots, (2) creating algorithms for designing procedure-specific and patient-specific robots (i.e., tube sets), (3) deriving kinematic and quasistatic load models, (4) creating real-time position and stiffness controllers for use in teleoperation, (5) designing tools and tool deployment technology for specific clinical interventions, (6) developing ultrasound image processing techniques for robot visualization and tracking, and (7) successfully performing beating-heart intracardiac surgery in animals. This talk will highlight our progress, describe our current goals and point out future challenges for steerable needles as surgical robots.

Beating-heart intracardiac steerable needle surgery. (a) Steerable needle enters internal jugular vein in neck and navigates through vasculature into right atrium. (b) Right atrium view of 5 DOF manipulator portion of needle. Arrows mark patent foramen ovale (PFO) channel allowing abnormal blood flow from right to left atrium. Surgery is to seal this channel. (c) Steerable needle robot comprised of three telescoping sections. (d) Magnified view of metal MEMS tissue approximation device delivered through lumen of steerable needle. (e) Teleoperated robot control inside beating heart is guided by 3D ultrasound. (f) Postmortem view of sealed porcine PFO channel.

Related Publications

  • Sears P, Dupont P. A Steerable Needle Technology Using Curved Concentric Tubes. Conf Proc IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2006:2850-2856.

  • Sears P, Dupont P. Inverse Kinematics of Concentric Tube Steerable Needles. IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics & Automation. Rome, Italy, 10-14 April, 2007. (PMC – In Process)

  • Mahvash M, Dupont P. Bilateral Teleoperation of Flexible Surgical Robots. New Vistas and Challenges in Telerobotics Workshop, IEEE 2008 International Conference on Robotics & Automation, Pasadena, CA, 19-23 May, 2008.

  • Cohen A, Chen R, Frodis U. Wu M, Folk C. Wafer-scale, Solid Freeform Fabrication of Fully-Assembled Metal Micro-Mechanisms for Minimally-Invasive Medical Devices. Proc. Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, 2009.

  • Dupont P, Lock J, Butler E. Torsional Kinematic Model for Concentric Tube Robots, Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2009:3851-3858. (PMCID: PMC3071574)

  • Dupont P, Lock J, Itkowitz B, Butler E. Design and Control of Concentric Tube Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics 2010;26(2):209-225. King-Sun Fu Best Paper of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics for 2010. (PMCID:PMC3022350)

  • Dupont P, Lock J, Itkowitz, B. Real-time Position Control of Concentric Tube Robots. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2010:562-568. (PMCID: PMC3198832)

  • Lock J, Laing G, Mahvash M, Dupont P. Quasistatic Modeling of Concentric Tube Robots with External Loads. Conf Proc IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2010:2325-2332. (PMCID: PMC3028209)

  • Mahvash M, Dupont P. Stiffness Control of a Continuum Manipulator in Contact with a Soft Environment. Conf Proc IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2010:863-870. (PMCID:PMC3051195)

  • Mahvash M, Dupont P. Stiffness Control of Surgical Continuum Manipulators. IEEE Transactions on Robotics 2011;27(2):334-345. (PMC – In Process)

  • Butler E, Folk C, Cohen A, Vasilyev N, Chen R, del Nido P, Dupont P. Metal MEMS Tools for Beating-heart Tissue Approximation. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2011:411-416. Finalist for Best Medical Robotics Paper. (PMCID: PMC3252216)

  • Bedell C, Lock J, Gosline A, Dupont P. Design Optimization of Concentric Tube Robots Based on Task and Anatomical Constraints. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2011:398-403. Finalist for Best Medical Robotics Paper. (PMCID: PMC3252204)

  • Anor T, Madsen J, Dupont P. Algorithms for Design of Continuum Robots Using the Concentric Tubes Approach: A Neurosurgical Example. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2011:667-673. (PMCID: PMC3262313)

  • Lock J, Dupont P. Friction Modeling in Concentric Tube Robots. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2011:1139-1146. (PMCID: PMC3282594)

  • Ren H, Vasilyev N, Dupont P. Detection of Curved Robots using 3D Ultrasound. Conf Proc IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2011:2083-2089. (PMCID: PMC3252206)

  • Ren H, Dupont P. Tubular Structure Enhancement for Surgical Instrument Detection in 3D Ultrasound. Conf Proc IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC) 2011:7203-7206. (PMCID: PMC3263977)

  • Laing G, Dupont P. Beating-heart Mitral Valve Chordal Replacement. Conf Proc IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC) 2011:2476-2479. (PMC – In Process)

  • Vasilyev N, Dupont P, del Nido P. Robotics and Imaging in Congenital Heart Surgery. Future Cardiology 2012;8(2):285-96. (PMC – In Process)

  • Gosline A, Vasilyev N, Butler E, Folk C, Cohen A, Chen R, Lang N, del Nido P, Dupont P. Percutaneous Intracardiac Beating-heart Surgery using Metal MEMS Tissue Approximation Tools. International Journal of Robotics Research 2012; in press. (PMC – In Process)

  • Gosline A, Vasilyev N, Veeramani A, Wu MT, Schmitz G, Chen R, Arabagi V, del Nido P, Dupont P. Metal MEMS Tools for Beating-heart Tissue Removal. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2012: in press. (PMC – In Process)

  • Ren H, Dupont P. Tubular Enhanced Geodesic Active Contours for Continuum Robot Detection using 3D Ultrasound. Conf Proc IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2012: in press. (PMC – In Process)

Links

Speaker website: www.childrenshospital.org/dupont , biorobotics.bu.edu

Videos of Robot and Tools:

1. Concentric Tube Robots and Metal MEMS Tools
2. Bimanual Dissection Using Two Concentric Tube Robots

Web Press Coverage

1. Shape-shifting 'tube robot' could aid heart surgery, Paul Marks, Newscientist.com, 26 May 2010.
2. Catheter-Based Microrobotic Vascular Surgery System from Boston Children’s, Gene Ostrovsky, Medgadget.com, 28 October 2010.
3. Concentric Tube Robots—a new robot technology that promises to revolutionize minimally invasive surgery. IEEE Life Sciences, August 2011.