Robotic assisted radio-frequency ablation of liver tumors - Randomized patient study

Abstract

The minimally invasive treatment of liver tumors represents an alternative to the open surgery approach, Radio-frequency ablation destroys a tumor by delivering radio-frequency energy through a needle probe. Traditionally, the probe is placed manually using imaging feedback, New approaches use robotic devices to accurately place the instrument at the target, The authors developed an image-guided robotic system for percutaneous interventions using computed tomography. The paper presents a randomized patient study comparing the manual versus robotic needle placement for radio-frequency ablation procedures of liver tumors. The results of this study show that in our case robotic interventions were a very viable solution. Several treatment parameters such as radiation exposures and procedure-times were found to be significantly improved in the robotic case. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.