Optimal planning of needle insertion for robotic-assisted prostate biopsy

Abstract

Robotic systems used for prostate biopsy offer important advantages compared to the manual procedures. In the robotic assisted prostate biopsy procedure, an important problem is to identify the optimal needle trajectories that allow reaching the target tissue and avoiding vital anatomical organs (major blood vessels, internal organs etc.). The paper presents an algorithm for optimal planning of the biopsy needle trajectories, based on virtual reality technologies, using as case study a novel parallel robot designed for transperineal prostate biopsy. The developed algorithm has been tested in a virtual environment for the prostate biopsy robotic-assisted procedure and results are presented.