Piezoelectrically Actuated Robotic System for MRI-Guided Prostate Percutaneous Therapy

This paper presents a fully actuated robotic system for percutaneous prostate therapy under continuously acquired live magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guidance. The system is composed of modular hardware and software to support the surgical workflow of intraoperative MRI-guided surgical procedures. We present the development of a 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) needle placement robot for transperineal prostate interventions. The robot consists of a 3-DOF needle driver module and a 3-DOF Cartesian motion module. The needle driver provides needle cannula translation and rotation (2-DOF) and stylet translation (1-DOF). A custom robot controller consisting of multiple piezoelectric motor drivers provides precision closed-loop control of piezoelectric motors and enables simultaneous robot motion and MR imaging. The developed modular robot control interface software performs image-based registration, kinematics calculation, and exchanges robot commands and coordinates between the navigation software and the robot controller with a new implementation of the open network communication protocol OpenIGTLink. Comprehensive compatibility of the robot is evaluated inside a 3-T MRI scanner using standard imaging sequences and the signal-to-noise ratio loss is limited to 15%. The image deterioration due to the present and motion of robot demonstrates unobservable image interference. Twenty-five targeted needle placements inside gelatin phantoms utilizing an 18-gauge ceramic needle demonstrated 0.87-mm root-mean-square (RMS) error in 3-D Euclidean distance based on MRI volume segmentation of the image-guided robotic needle placement procedure.