30 accepted papers
Despite decades of research in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-compatible robotic technologies, the existing MRI-safe needle drivers rarely feature simultaneously high compactness, large insertion force, and motion versatility, all of which are critical to facilitate clinical translation in intraop…
Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is a critical yet challenging procedure due to dynamic imaging conditions and difficulties in needle visualization. Many methods have been proposed for automated needle insertion, but they often rely on hand-crafted pipelines with modular controllers, whose pe…
Neural implicit surface reconstruction with signed distance function has made significant progress, but recovering fine details such as thin structures and complex geometries remains challenging due to unreliable or noisy geometric priors. Existing approaches rely on implicit uncertainty that arises…
As one of the effective closed-loop control methods, visual servoing control methods are widely applied to continuum robots. However, existing visual servoing control methods mostly focus on accurate control of the robot’s end-effector, with less consideration given to the robot’s shape. In this wor
Efficient and high-fidelity reconstruction of deformable surgical scenes is a critical yet challenging task. Building on recent advancements in 3D Gaussian splatting, current methods have seen significant improvements in both reconstruction quality and rendering speed. However, two major limitations
Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is widely employed in percutaneous interventions. However, providing feedback on the needle tip position via US imaging presents challenges due to noise, artifacts, and the thin imaging plane of US, which degrades needle features and leads to intermittent tip
Flexible endoscope motion tracking and analysis in mechanical simulators have proven useful for endoscopy training. Common motion tracking methods based on electromagnetic tracker are however limited by their high cost and material susceptibility. In this work, the motion-guided dual-camera vision t
Existing sensor-based global localization methods limit the miniaturization potential of magnetically-actuated endoscopes (MAE) while localization based on external medical imaging demands accurate registration and imposes a variety of modality-specific challenges during continuous image acquisition
Magnetic actuation has been widely investigated for miniature robot control due to its wireless control capability. As a permanent magnetic (PM) actuation system, the Halbach array can provide strong and controllable magnetic fields with large motion workspace. However, existing cylindrical Halbach
Defocus blur is a persistent problem in microscope imaging that poses harm to pathology interpretation and medical intervention in cell microscopy and microscope surgery. To address this problem a unified framework including the multi-pyramid transformer (MPT) and extended frequency contrastive regu…
Recently, fiber optic sensors such as fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have been widely investigated for shape reconstruction and force estimation of flexible surgical robots. However, most existing approaches need precise model parameters of FBGs inside the fiber and their alignments with the flexible r…
The sampling-based motion planners, including the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithms, are widely utilized in continuum robots, enabling efficient search for feasible motion plans in constrained environments. In surgical robotics, complex mapping among the high-dimensional kinematics of
Pericardiocentesis is an important surgical intervention to treat a medical condition called pericardial effusion, during which excessive fluid accumulates around the heart, potentially leading to life-threatening situation. It involves the insertion of a needle and catheter towards the heart into t…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is increasingly used for robotic needle-based clinical diagnosis and therapy due to its high resolution and high soft tissue contrast. A needle driver therefore becomes an essential part of these MRI -guided robotic systems to perform in-bore needle placement under c…
Ultrasound (US) is widely used in image-guided needle procedures. Correctly tracking the needle tip position in US images during the procedure plays an important role in improving the needle targeting accuracy and patient safety. This paper presents a leaning-based visual tracking network with a Sia…
Transoral robotic surgery (TORS) in upper aerodigestive tract remains challenging due to the rigidity and insufficient workspace of existing instruments, and inappropriate balance between compliance and stiffness in flexible instruments. In this letter, a flexible surgical robotic instrument, featur
Magnetic soft robots have attracted widespread attention for their untethered, remotely operated, and compliant deformation characteristics. Earlier work has demonstrated magnetic origami robots' diverse locomotion capabilities. This letter will focus on the motion generation and open-loop control o
The combination of a dexterous continuum robot and magnetic resonance imaging can potentially improve surgical precision and minimize brain manipulation in a minimally invasive neurosurgical procedure. In this work, a seven degree-of-freedom (DoF) continuum neurosurgical robot was developed. The mai…
A neurosurgical robot with 3-dimensional (3D) distal manipulation can increase instrument workspace for reaching peripheral regions of intracranial lesions to achieve complete lesion removal and minimal brain manipulation in a keyhole procedure. In this work, we designed a Nitinol-based symmetricall
Multi-segment continuum robots, that offer inherent compliance and distal dexterity, are suitable for deployment in minimally invasive surgical procedures. Cable-driven mechanism is commonly used in continuum surgical robots but could lead to inter-segment motion coupling in a multi-segment robot. I…
Ultrasound (US) is commonly used in percutaneous needle procedures for real-time guidance. Accurate and robust automatic needle tracking is highly desirable to address the influence of noise and artifacts in US images. This letter presents a tracking approach which combines an improved compressive t
Continuum robotic manipulators are increasingly adopted in minimal invasive surgery. However, their nonlinear behavior is challenging to model accurately, especially when subject to external interaction, potentially leading to poor control performance. In this letter, we investigate the feasibility
Most existing surgical robots employ straight rigid instruments and are not compatible with imaging modalities, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that presents restrictive constraints on the robot and actuator materials. Employing continuum distal end effector and fulfilling multi-imager c…
Pericardiocentesis is the drainage of excessive fluid in the pericardium surrounding the heart under ultrasound guidance. The percutaneous procedure comes with the risk of cardiac perforation since the needle is inserted towards the beating heart. This letter presents a novel percutaneous robot that
Robotic hands with anthropomorphism considerations are of prominent popularity in human-centered environment. Existing anthropomorphic robotic hands achieving part or most of human hand comparable dexterity have been applied as various robotic end-effectors and prosthetics. However, two deficiencies…
The letter presents a compact shape memory alloy (SMA)-actuated magnetic resonance (MR)-conditional neurosurgical robotic system. It consists of a 2-degree of freedom (DoF) cable-driven steerable end effector, an antagonistic SMA springs-based actuation module, and a quick-connect module, packaged i
We present a modular sensing system to measure the deflection of a minimally invasive neurosurgical intracranial robot: MINIR-II. The MINIR-II robot is a tendon-driven continuum robot comprised of multiple spring backbone segments, which has been developed in our prior work. Due to the flexibility o
The paper presents an MRI-compatible neurosurgical robotic system that is designed to operate the head-mounted meso-scale 6-degree-of-freedom (DoF) spring-based MINIR-II. The robotic system consists of an actuation module, a transmission module, and the robot module. The transmission module consist
Minimally invasive neurosurgical robotic procedure performed under real-time MRI can be achieved with a robot that is head-mounted and fits in a standard MRI bore. The design of a remotely-actuated cable-driven robotic system is presented in this work. A head mounted insertion module has been develo…
Robotic surgery, especially in the field of neurosurgery, can be tremendously improved with the integration of an excellent imaging modality during the procedure. Shape memory alloy (SMA), a high power density and inexpensive MRI-compatible actuator, is therefore being considered as an appropriate a…