A targeting method for robot-assisted percutaneous needle placement under fluoroscopy guidance.

BACKGROUND Minimally invasive procedures are rapidly growing in popularity thanks to advancements in medical robots, visual navigation and space registration techniques. This paper presents a precise and efficient targeting method for robot-assisted percutaneous needle placement under C-arm fluoroscopy. METHOD A special end-effector was constructed to perform fluoroscopy calibration and robot to image-space registration simultaneously and automatically. In addition, formulations were given to compute the movement of robot targeting and evaluate targeting accuracy using only one X-ray image. RESULT A pre-clinical experiment showed that the maximum angle error was 0.94° and the maximum position error of a target located 80 mm below the end-effector was 1.31 mm. And evaluation of the system in a robot-assisted pedicle screws placement surgery has justified the accuracy and reliability of proposed method in clinical applications. CONCLUSION The positioning accuracy was increased by using present method. Moreover, radiation exposure and operation time were reduced significantly compared to other commonly used methods.