Generalized trajectory planning for nonlinear interventions

Abstract

Minimally invasive procedures with flexible instruments such as endoscopes, needles or drilling units are becoming more and more common. Their automated insertion will be standard across several applications in operation rooms of the future. In such scenarios regular re-planning for feasible nonlinear trajectories is a mandatory step toward automation. However, state of the art methods focus on isolated solutions only. In this paper we introduce a generalized motion planning formulation in SE(3), regarding both position and orientation, that is suitable for these approaches. To emphasize the generalization of this formulation we evaluate the performance of proposed Bidirectional Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (Bi-RRT) on four different clinical applications: Drilling in temporal bone surgery, trajectory planning for cardiopulmonary endoscopy, automatic needle insertion for spine biopsy and liver tumor removal. Experiments show that for all four scenarios the formulation is suitable and feasible trajectories can be planned successfully.