Towards an Ultrasound-Guided Needle Insertion System for Prostate Brachytherapy
Bardia Konh
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA
konh@hawaii.edu
Abstract
Needle insertion techniques have been used in several minimally invasive procedures for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. For example, in prostate brachytherapy, hollow slender needles are used to implant radioactive seeds inside the prostate to kill the cancerous tissue locally. However, it is often challenging to guide and track the needle in a desired path to reach the target precisely, while avoiding sensitive organs or large arteries. Typical difficulties that complicate precise execution of the implant plan include organ dislocation, unknown deformation and motion of tissue, unpredictable device motion, tissue inhomogeneity, intraoperative edema, instrumentation and calibration errors, needle deflection, and human errors. These difficulties have caused average practitioners to get unsuccessful outcomes. Needle steering has been an active field of research in the past decade. Researchers have introduced passive and active needles to improve navigation and targeting inside the tissue. This work introduces a novel active “cable-driven” steerable needle capable of bending inside the tissue in multiple directions to reach target. A motorized manipulation system is developed and programmed to pull the cable tendons and control the needle deflection inside tissue. A robotic needle insertion system has been used to insert and manipulate the active needle inside tissue. For real-time tracking of the needle tip during a needle insertion task, a robot-assisted ultrasound tracking method has been developed. The position of the needle tip is an important information for closed-loop control of the needle inside tissue.
Short Bio
Bardia Konh is the director of the Advanced Materials and Medical Instruments (AMMI) Laboratory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). He joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UHM as an Assistant Professor in 2016, after receiving his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. He received his BSc and MS degrees both in Mechanical Engineering from K. N. Toosi University of Technology and Free University of Science and Research in Tehran, Iran, in 2007 and 2011, respectively. His group is currently working on developing meso-scale medical robots to perform surgical tasks more accurately and less invasively to improve medical outcomes.