Robot-assisted image-guided targeting for minimally invasive neurosurgery: 
planning, registration, and in-vitro experiment

R. Shamir (1), M. Freiman (1), L. Joskowicz (1), M. Shoham (2,3), E. Zehavi (3), 
Y. Shoshan (4)

(1) School of Engineering and Computer Science, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, Israel.
(2) Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel. 
(3) Mazor Surgical Technologies, Caesarea, Israel. 
(4) Dept. of Neurosurgery, School of Medicine, Hadassah University Hospital, Israel.

Abstract:

This paper present a novel image-guided system for precise automatic
targeting in keyhole minimally invasive neurosurgery. The system consists
of a miniature robot fitted with a mechanical guide for needle/probe
insertion.  Intraoperatively, the robot is directly affixed to a head clamp
or to the patient skull. It automatically positions itself with respect to
predefined targets in a preoperative CT/MRI image following an anatomical
registration with a intraoperative 3D surface scan of the patient facial
features.  We describe the preoperative planning and registration modules,
and an in-vitro registration experiment of the entire system which yields a
target registration error of 1.7mm (std=0.7mm).

Keywords: minimally invasive keyhole neurosurgery, medical robotics,
registration

Published in: 8th Int. Conf. on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Aided
Intervention, MICCAI 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3750,
Srpinger-Verlag, 2005, pp 131--138.