Toward the Development of a Flexible Mesoscale MRI-Compatible Neurosurgical Continuum Robot

Brain tumor, be it primary or metastatic, is usually life threatening for a person of any age. Primary surgical resection is one of the most effective ways of treating brain tumors and can have a tremendously increased success rate if the appropriate imaging modality is used for complete tumor resection. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the imaging modality of choice for brain tumor imaging because of its excellent soft-tissue contrast. MRI combined with continuum soft robotics has immense potential to be the next major technological breakthrough in the field of brain cancer diagnosis and therapy. In this paper, we present the design, kinematic, and force analysis of a flexible spring-based minimally invasive neurosurgical intracranial robot. It is comprised of an interconnected inner spring and an outer spring and is connected to actively cooled shape memory alloy (SMA) spring actuators via tendon driven mechanism. Our robot has three serially connected 2-DoF segments, which can be independently controlled due to the central tendon routing configuration. The kinematic and force analysis of the robot and the independent segment control were verified by experiments. Robot motion under forced cooling of SMA springs was evaluated as well as the MRI compatibility of the robot and its motion capability in brain-like gelatin environment.