Virtual Planning of Needle Guidance for a Parallel Robot used in Brachytherapy

Abstract

Brachytherapy (BT) is an innovative cancer treatment option that allows the delivery of high doses of radiation to specific areas of the body. BT has an important advantage: it doesn’t irradiate unnecessarily healthy tissue, but focalizes mainly on the destruction of tumorous cells. The paper presents an innovative parallel robot designed for BT and a needle trajectory planning software. The algorithm designed for virtual planning of robotic needle insertion allows automatic or manual definition of the needles trajectory. A virtual reality environment has been modelled and simulations using a real needle trajectory have been conducted.