9 accepted papers
Steerable needles are medical devices with the ability to follow curvilinear paths to reach targets while circumventing obstacles. In the deployment process, a human operator typically places the steerable needle at its start position on a tissue surface and then hands off control to the automation…
Medical steerable needles can follow 3D curvilinear trajectories inside body tissue, enabling them to move around critical anatomical structures and precisely reach clinically significant targets in a minimally invasive way. Automating needle steering, with motion planning as a key component, has th…
Lung cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancer, and early diagnosis is crucial for successful treatment. Definitively diagnosing lung cancer typically requires biopsy, but current approaches either carry a high procedural risk for the patient or are incapable of reaching many sites of clinical
The inspection-planning problem calls for computing motions for a robot that allow it to inspect a set of points of interest (POIs) while considering plan quality (e.g., plan length). This problem has applications across many domains where robots can help with inspection, including infrastructure ma…
Steerable needles that are able to follow curvilinear trajectories and steer around anatomical obstacles are a promising solution for many interventional procedures. In the lung, these needles can be deployed from the tip of a conventional bronchoscope to reach lung lesions for diagnosis. The reach…
Medical steerable needles can move along 3D curvilinear trajectories to avoid anatomical obstacles and reach clinically significant targets inside the human body. Automating steerable needle procedures can enable physicians and patients to harness the full potential of steerable needles by maximally…
We present a method that plans motions for a concentric tube robot to automatically reach surgical targets inside the body while avoiding obstacles, where the patient's anatomy is represented by point clouds. Point clouds can be generated intra-operatively via endoscopic instruments, enabling the sy…
Inspection planning, the task of planning motions that allow a robot to inspect a set of points of interest, has applications in domains such as industrial, field, and medical robotics. Inspection planning can be computationally challenging, as the search space over motion plans that inspect the poi…
Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer, and early diagnosis is critical to favorable survival rates. Definitive diagnosis of lung cancer typically requires needle biopsy. Common lung nodule biopsy approaches either carry significant risk or are incapable of accessing large regions of the lung,…