Skull-Mounted Robot for CT-Guided Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery: Mechanical Design and Preliminary Accuracy Evaluation

This paper presents a skull-mounted, four-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) robot for image-guided minimally invasive neurosurgery interventions. The design of the robot is optimized to be lightweight and compact such that it can be attached to the skull with a compact mounting frame. It has a needle guide that can be adapted to assist various image-guided, needle-based percutaneous interventions such as biopsy and ventriculostomy. The robot mechanism and the control system are designed and manufactured with components compatible with Computed Tomography (CT) systems. Though the current version of the robot presented in this paper is optimized for neurosurgery under CT guidance, it can be used for other interventions where the robot can be attached to the desired anatomical location. This paper presents the robot's mechanical design, kinematics, initialization procedure, and bench-top accuracy assessment. The accuracy evaluation experiments demonstrated an average targeting error of 1.69 ± 0.86mm.