Multichannel robotic system for surgical procedures

A large and increasing number of cancer interventions including both diagnosis and therapy such as in-vivo analysis using optical, Raman spectroscopy, chemicals, as well as brachytherapy, photodynamic therapy (PDT), radio-frequency (RF) based thermal ablation, biopsy, and viral/gene therapy involve precise placement of needles. A majority of these interventions today are performed percutaneously. Guiding needle to a precise location inside soft tissue is a difficult task. Moreover, quantitative real-time sensory feedback is seldom available, and the needle is usually rigid. Many procedures could benefit from closing the control loop through quantitative sensory feedback and the ability to adjust the needle trajectory in real-time. In this paper, we present a multichannel robotic system developed for percutaneous interventions using real-time sensory feedback. The developed system is capable of inserting a large number of needles concurrently and also can deposit radioactive seeds for cases such as brachytherapy. Numerous techniques perfected by a variety of experiments have been implemented in the system design and development. Thus, this system possesses potential several advantages as compared to single needle insertion technique. Performance of this multichannel robot has been demonstrated with experimental results.