C-arm and Patient Table Integrated Kinematics and Surgical Workspace Analysis

X-rays are extensively used in minimally invasive surgeries. C-arm devices used for X-ray imaging are usually repositioned multiple times until the desired anatomy is properly viewed. In this work, the C-arm kinematic chain is integrated with patient table to increase degrees of freedom (DOF) and surgical workspace which will enable capturing anatomies from additional poses. A collision detection algorithm was developed to detect collisions between the C-arm and patient table using their 3D models. Using the collision detection algorithm and integrated kinematics, surgical workspace analysis was performed for typical clinical interventional projections and varying DOF setups. Moving the patient table showed more collision-free workspace for multiple clinical interventional projections compared to moving the C-arm device alone. Additionally, moving both the C-arm and patient table were key to attain many clinical interventional poses and overall, significantly increased collision-free workspace. To provide benchmark, a numerical iterative method was used to solve inverse kinematics by optimizing setups with varying DOF for different clinical interventional projections. A collision-free dataset consisting of random joint configurations and their corresponding target poses was created, and the code is made publicly available to enable researchers to further develop inverse kinematics algorithms.