Brain biopsy is the gold standard to determine the type and grade of brain tumours. In current clinical practice, the cannula insertion and application of vacuum pressure is based on neurosurgeons’ manual operation, which may lead to insertion error, excessive tissue removal or even haemorrhage.
A Semi-autonomous Stereotactic Brain Biopsy Robotic System with Enhanced Safety
Researchers
Introduction
The Main Impact
1
In this project, we propose a semi-autonomous stereotactic brain biopsy robotic system for surgeon workload reduction and patient safety enhancement. This system includes two novel components: a brain biopsy robotic module and a constrained cannula with tissue blocker. The module can achieve all the procedures in brain biopsy, including cannula insertion, vacuum pressure generation, side cutting, etc., while the cannula can guarantee effective tissue sampling and avoid overstretching the tissue.
Brain biopsy robotic system
Constrained cannula
2
With the developed system, neurosurgeons’ operation is only required for syringe (un)installation and tissue acquisition, which greatly reduces their workload, since this system can perform automatic neuronavigation and brain biopsy. This project improves existing neurosurgical systems, in terms of autonomy level from mechanical guidance to task autonomy, surgical safety, and surgeon-robot collaboration.
Ex vivo experiment