Development and Experimental Testing of a Robot-Assisted Positioning System for Brachytherapy

Optical-based tracking and localization systems, widely utilized in brachytherapy surgeries, have been suffering from the problem of target loss caused by the visual occlusion exists in clinical practice. This work presents the development and experimental testing of a robot-assisted localization system for brachytherapy using OptiTrack. The flexible configuration of the multiple cameras can effectively solve this visual occlusion problem. A complete workflow based on this system is also proposed with the full consideration of clinical requirements. Finally, the accuracy test was carried out using an agar phantom, and the experimental results showed that the average error of the needle tip position was measured to be 0.3 mm, and the center of gravity errors of the two seed implantation experiments are found to be 0.92±0.64 mm and 0.61±0.25 mm, respectively. The proposed system has potential value in clinical application.