Development of force sensing techniques for needle surgeries

Needle insertion into soft tissue often results in sudden rupture of tissue-layers, further leading to penetrations of adjacent multiple tissue-layers, which may cause damages to sensitive organs. To reduce needle placement error during surgery and give force feedback to surgeons, force sensors were widely used in needle applications in past decades. This paper reviews current force sensing mechanisms and latest needle sensing applications, including their capabilities, advantages and limitations. Among those sensing principles, optical force sensing methods show a great potential for needle sensing applications, especially in embedding applications under the surgical environments with MRI devices.