An Ultrasound-Guided Miniature Hand-Eye Integrated Robot for Percutaneous Needle Placement

Ultrasound-guided percutaneous puncture technology has advantages such as intra-operative real-time imaging, noninvasive operation, high targeting accuracy, nonionizing radiation, and low cost. However, traditional percutaneous puncture surgery requires doctors to hold ultrasound probes or puncture needles, which causes complex operations. In this article, by integrating ultrasound and needle insertion mechanisms, an ultrasound-guided miniature puncture robot is proposed. This robot can work without an external navigation or industrial or cooperative manipulator after hand-eye calibration and acknowledge the coordinate relationship between the ultrasound image and the robot tip. A three degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) of in-plane mechanism using linear actuators is designed so that the puncture needle can always be scanned by ultrasound during the operation, ensuring real-time monitoring. The method of planning puncture path, modeling the robot kinematics, and ultrasound hand-eye calibration are proposed. To track a needle in an ultrasound image, the image recognition and filter algorithm for the needle tip are presented. The accuracy of the robot puncture operation is verified by point targeting and path tracking experiments in the water tank and phantom, and the puncture error of the robot is 1.5 ± 0.5 mm in the water tank, 1.98 mm in the abdominal phantom, and 1.41 mm in the breast phantom. Finally, the work of this article effectively improves the availability and effectiveness of the ultrasound-guided puncture robot.