Body-Mounted Robot for Image-Guided Percutaneous Interventions: Mechanical Design and Preliminary Accuracy Evaluation

This paper presents a body-mounted, four degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) parallel mechanism robot for image-guided percutaneous interventions. The design of the robot is optimized to be light weight and compact such that it could be mounted to the patient body. It has a modular design that can be adopted for assisting various image-guided, needle-based percutaneous interventions such as arthrography, biopsy and brachytherapy seed placement. The robot mechanism and the control system are designed and manufactured with components compatible with imaging modalities including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT). The current version of the robot presented in this paper is optimized for shoulder arthrography under MRI guidance; a Z-shaped fiducial frame is attached to the robot, providing accurate and repeatable robot registration with the MR scanner coordinate system. Here we present the mechanical design of the manipulator, robot kinematics, robot calibration procedure, and preliminary bench-top accuracy assessment. The bench-top accuracy evaluation of the robotic manipulator shows average translational error of 1.01 mm and 0.96 mm in X and Z axes, respectively, and average rotational error of 3.06 degrees and 2.07 degrees about the X and Z axes, respectively.