12 accepted papers
Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRg-FUS) has become attractive, accredited to its non-invasive nature. However, ultrasound beams focusing and steering is still challenging owing to aberrations induced by soft tissue heterogeneity. In particular for beam motion control to ensure real-ti
An <i>in situ</i> needle manipulation technique used by physicians when performing spinal injections is modeled to study its effect on needle shape and needle tip position. A mechanics-based model is proposed and solved using finite element method. A test setup is presented to mimic the needle manip
Although the soft robot is gaining considerable popularity in dexterous and safe manipulation, accurate motion control is still an open problem to be explored. Recent investigations suggest that reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising solution but lacks efficient adaptability for Sim2Real transfe…
Focused ultrasound (FUS) technology attracts increasing interests accrediting to its non-invasive and painless treatment of tumors. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guidance has been introduced to monitor this procedure, thus allowing the ultrasound foci to be precisely controlled. However, manual p
Lumbar injection is an image-guided procedure performed manually for diagnosis and treatment of lower back pain and leg pain. Previously, we have developed and verified an MR-Conditional robotic solution to assisting the needle insertion process. Drawing on our clinical experiences, a virtual remote…
Percutaneous ablation is a standard therapy for most cases of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which is a general type of primary liver cancer. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers high-contrast images of soft tissue to monitor the ablation procedure. However, the success of MRI-guided ablation st
In the feature/object tracking of eye-in-hand visual servoing, 2D motion estimation relying only on image plane feedback is easily affected by vision occlusion, blurring, or poor lighting. For the commonly-used template matching method, tracking performance greatly depends on the image quality. Fibe
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guided intervention has drawn increasing attention over the last decade. It is accredited to the capability of monitoring any physiological change of soft tissue with the high-contrast MR images. This also gives rise to the demand for precise tele-manipulation of int
In this letter, we present a new soft and flexible sensor which can reconstruct its surface shape in real time. A single-core optical fiber with fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) is capable of detecting sparse local strains at high bandwidth using wavelength-division multiplexing. The fiber was embedded i
Soft robots, owing to their elastomeric material, ensure safe interaction with their surroundings. These robot compliance properties inevitably impose a tradeoff against precise motion control, as to which conventional model-based methods were proposed to approximate the robot kinematics. However, t
In this letter, we present an intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided robot for bilateral stereotactic procedures. Its compact design enables robot's operation within the constrained space of standard imaging head coil. magnetic resonance (MR) safe and high-performance hydraulic trans
This paper presents a novel proximity query (PQ) approach capable to detect the collision and calculate the minimal Euclidean distance between two non-convex objects in 3D, namely the robot and the environment. Such approaches are often considered as computationally demanding problems, but are of im…