An Ultrasound-guided Miniature Hand-eye Integrated Robot for Percutaneous Needle Placement

Abstract Ultrasound-guided percutaneous puncture technology has advantages such as intra-operative real-time imaging, non-invasive operation, high targeting accuracy, non-ionizing radiation and low cost. However, traditional percutaneous puncture surgery requires doctors to hold ultrasound probes or puncture needles, which causes complex operation. In this paper, by integrating ultrasound and needle insertion mechanism, an ultrasound guided miniature puncture robot is proposed. This robot can work without an external navigation or industrial or cooperative manipulator after hand-eye calibration and acknowledge of coordinate relationship between ultrasound image and robot tip. A 3 DoFs of in-plane mechanism using linear actuators is designed so that the puncture needle can always be scanned by ultrasound during the operation, ensuring the real-time monitoring. Method of planning puncture path, modeling the robot kinematics and ultrasound hand-eye calibration are proposed. To track a needle in ultrasound image, the image recognition and filter algorithm for the needle tip are presented. The accuracy of the robot puncture operation is verified by point targeting and path tracking experiments in water tank and phantom, the puncture error of the robot is 1.5 ± 0.5mm in the water tank, 1.98mm in the abdominal phantom, and 1.41 mm in the breast phantom. Finally, the work of this paper effectively improves the availability and effectiveness of ultrasound-guided puncture robot.