Image-guided Positioning Robot for Single-port Brain Surgery Robotic Manipulator

The paper presents an image-guided positioning robot for a single-port brain surgery robotic manipulator. Due to its limited workspace, the robotic manipulator that performs a fine operation needs to be precisely and stably positioned near the target area. For this purpose, an accurate guidance of a positioning robot to the target position using CT images is developed. The developed brain surgery robot system consists of a single-port robotic manipulator, a positioning robot, an optical tracking system, a brain phantom, and an image model obtained from the pre-operative CT data of the brain phantom. The positioning robot supports the single-port robotic manipulator and positions it near a surgical site. To guide the surgical manipulator into a variety of positions and orientations, a 6-DOF serial robot is introduced as the positioning robot. The coordinate transformations among the image model, the brain phantom and the positioning robot and the single-port robotic manipulator are obtained to guide the positioning robot and to perform the registration between CT image of the phantom and the real phantom. The simple algorithm to specify the target location of the positioning robot in CT coordinate system is proposed. Using the coordinate transformations and the desired target location and orientation, it is possible to guide the positioning robot into the desired target position and orientation. The experimental result shows the targeting error of the proposed method is sufficiently small.