A Novel Robotic Guidance System with Eye Gaze Tracking Control for Needle based Interventions
Abstract
The robotic technologies have been widely used in the operating room for decades. Among them, needle based percutaneous interventions have attracted much attention from engineering and medical communities. However, the currently used robotic systems for interventional procedures are too cumbersome, requiring a large footprint in the operating room. Recently developed light-weight puncture robotic systems for needle positioning are able to reduce the size, but has the limitation of awkward ergonomics. In this paper, we design a compact robotic guidance system that could accurately realize the needle position and orientation within the operating room. The eye gaze tracking based approach is proposed to control the position and orientation of the needle towards the desired location in a more intuitive manner, and the forward and inverse kinematics of this 4-DoF robot are analyzed. The Robot Operating System (ROS) based experimental studies are performed to evaluate the needle placement accuracy during interventional therapy. The result indicated the effectiveness of the proposed robotic hardware and the eye gaze based control framework, which can achieve a distance error of the robot’s end effector to the target point within 1 mm.