Collaborative Robotic Ultrasound Tissue Scanning for Surgical Resection Guidance in Neurosurgery
This work addresses the need for optimized surgical resection in neurosurgery, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotic and imaging technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of intraoperative diagnosis and surgical resection guidance in neurosurgery by introducing a robotic platform for autonomous ultrasound tissue scanning, using the DLR MIRO surgical robotic arm to control force and motion for brain tumor scanning.
The aim of this paper is to introduce a robotic platform for autonomous iUS tissue scanning to optimise intraoperative diagnosis and improve surgical resection during robot-assisted operations. To guide anatomy specific robotic scanning and generate a representation of the robot task space, fast and accurate techniques for the recovery of 3D morphological structures of the surgical cavity are developed. The prototypic DLR MIRO surgical robotic arm is used to control the applied force and the in-plane motion of the US transducer. A key application of the proposed platform is the scanning of brain tissue to guide tumour resection.