Planning fireworks trajectories for steerable medical needles to reduce patient trauma

— Accurate needle insertion in 3D environment is always a grand challenge. When multiple targets are located in the tissue, a procedure of inserting multiple needles from a single small region on the patient’s skin, so called “fireworks” insertion as shown in Fig. 1, can be executed to further reduce trauma on the patient. In this paper, we explore motion planning for “fireworks” needle insertion in 3D environments by developing an algorithm based on the Forest of Rapidlyexploring Random Trees (RRTs). Given a set of targets, we propose an algorithm to quickly explore the configuration space by building a forest of RRTs and find feasible plans for multiple steerable needles from a single entry region. With different optimality considerations, we present two path selection algorithms to optimize the final plan among all feasible outputs. Finally, we implement the algorithm in an approximate prostate cancer treatment environment and simulation results demonstrate the perf...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Jijie Xu, Vincent Duindam, Ron Alterovitz, Jean Pouliot, J. Adam M. Cunha, I-Chow Hsu, Kenneth Y. Goldberg
• Keywords: Accurate Needle Insertion, Algorithm, IROS 2009, Needle Insertion, Robotics