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A Surgical Planning Toolkit for Robotic Stereotactic Neurosurgery

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Robotic Image-guided surgeries (RIGS) have flourished in the past two decades. Advancements in the field have led to a wide adaptation of this technology in many areas of surgery including the tissue biopsy, tumor ablation, and targeted drug delivery. One example is the MRI-guided stereotactic robotic-assisted surgery for conformal brain tumor ablation, where the robot is used to position and orient a thin probe to target a desired region within the brain. Requirements such as the remote center of motion and precise manipulation, impose the use of complex kinematic structures, which result in non-trivial workspaces in these robots. The lack of workspace visualization poses a challenge in selecting valid entry and target points during the surgical planning and navigation stage. This thesis presents a surgical planning toolkit for an MRI-compatible stereotactic neurosurgery robot. The toolkit aims to improve the accuracy of the surgical intervention and reduce the operative time by augmenting the surgeons field of vision. The tools available to the surgeon help render and augment the robot's reachable workspace over the MRI volume, identify the cranial burr-hole and an optimal Entry Point, and finally render the effective sub (treatment) workspace to assist the surgeon in placing a Target Point within the bounds of the robot's reach. Finally, the tools presented are validated for accuracy using a variety of experiments. The accuracy of the workspace visualization is validated using phantom studies. The accuracy of semi-automated burr-hole identification and Entry Point selection is validated using a set of experiments. A user study was carried out to identify the deviation between Entry Points placed by an expert neurosurgeon with and without assistance of the toolkit. Finally, the applicability of the toolkit in a clinical environment was demonstrated through subacute pig studies.

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  • etd-25986
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  • 2021
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  • 2021-07-12
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Permanent link to this page: https://digital.wpi.edu/show/r207ts37d