A Novel Robotic Guidance System With Eye-Gaze Tracking Control for Needle-Based Interventions

The robotic technologies have been widely used in the operating room for decades. Among them, needle-based percutaneous interventions have attracted much attention from engineering and medical communities. However, the currently used robotic systems for interventional procedures are too cumbersome, requiring a large footprint in the operating room. Recently developed light-weight puncture robotic systems for needle positioning are able to reduce the size, but has the limitation of awkward ergonomics. In this article, we design a compact robotic guidance system that could accurately realize the needle position and orientation within the operating room. The eye-gaze tracking-based approach is proposed to control the position and orientation of the needle toward the desired location in a more intuitive manner, and the forward and inverse kinematics of this 4-DoF robot are analyzed. The robot operating system (ROS)-based experimental studies are performed to evaluate the needle placement accuracy during interventional therapy. The result indicated the effectiveness of the proposed robotic hardware and the eye-gaze-based control framework, which can achieve a distance error of the robot’s end effector to the target point within 1 mm.