Development of a prototype of puncturing robot for CT-guided intervention

Interventional radiology is a minimally invasive image-guided procedure. In the case of using computed tomography (CT) as an image-guidance for interventional radiology, the radiation exposure is a major problem to an operator who stands close to a CT gantry. To solve this problem, we are developing a remote-controlled puncturing robot which has five degrees of freedom. In this paper, we describe the details of the prototype robot and show experimental results to evaluate the robot's repeatability and a result of puncturing to a phantom.