Adaptive modelling of percutaneous needle insertion for biopsy procedures
Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and localised therapy have become integral parts of modern medical practices as they are characterised by decreased recovery time, reduced patient discomfort and lower risk of infection, when compared to open surgery. Percutaneous needle insertion constitutes one of the main practices for performing MIS, including a plethora of diagnostic and therapeutic applications, such as tissue biopsy, brachytherapy, neurosurgery, and deep brain stimulation. The success rate of these operations heavily relies on the accuracy of needle placement, while imprecise targeting can often lead to severe complications, such as false negatives in biopsy or ablation of healthy tissue. At the same time, accurate percutaneous needle placement is a highly challenging task. The limited visual feedback during the operation, combined with factors, such as tissue anisotropy, heterogeneity and variability in anatomical structures among different patients, complicates navigation through the tissue and thus decreases the operation’s overall accuracy.
This project aims to provide a complete kinematic and dynamic characterisation of needle-tissue interaction, during minimally invasive percutaneous needle insertion procedures and new mathematical tools for the description of the underlying force and moment profiles of needle-tissue interaction both in real-time and with high accuracy. Furthermore, given that the dynamics that correspond to the deterministic components of needle-tissue interaction have been fully identified (e.g., contact and fracture mechanics), this work will focus on the development of adaptive mechanisms, such as online parameter estimation methods, that will account for the stochastic aspects of needle insertion, such as the tissue anisotropy and heterogeneity.
Team
Athanasios Martsopoulos
Tom Hill
Stefanos Bolomytis
Raj Persad
Antonia Tzemanaki
Funding
EPSRC FARSCOPE CDT