Visiting a Sequence of Points with a Bevel-Tip Needle

Many surgical procedures could benefit from guiding a bevel-tip needle along circular arcs to multiple treatment points in a patient. At each treatment point, the needle can inject a radioactive pellet into a cancerous region or extract a tissue sample. Our main result is an algorithm to steer a bevel-tip needle through a sequence of treatment points in the plane while minimizing the number of times that the needle must be reoriented. This algorithm is related to [6] and takes quadratic time when consecutive points in the sequence are sufficiently separated. We can also guide a needle through an arbitrary sequence of points in the plane by accounting for a lack of optimal substructure.