Pneumatically Actuated MR-Safe Parallel Robot for Deep Brain Stimulation Electrode Implantation

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been widely used in clinical practice as an effective therapy for neurological disorders. MR-conditional robot-assisted electrode implantation has attracted more attention for DBS because of its great accuracy and high-quality guiding images by using MRI. This paper develops a pneumatically actuated MR-safe parallel robot for deep brain electrode implantation. Its fully plastic components and MR-safe pneumatic actuators enable the robotic system to be MR-safe, posing no known hazards in MR environment. A 6-DOF parallel robot is developed using six slider-crank mechanisms for prismatic motions. Inverse kinematics is built to investigate its workspace and achieve the precise control. Experiments are carried out to validate the feasibility, and results shows that the average error of the motion is 0.11 mm. The developed parallel robot shows the potential advantages in the automatic and precise robot-assisted neurosurgical surgery in future.