Development And Empirical Study Of Robotic System For Ultrasound-guided Percutaneous Microwave Ablation

Recent studies have shown that ultrasound-guided percutaneous microwave ablation is a simple, safe and potentially effective treatment for patients with liver tumors. To facilitate normative application of this technology further and make it more objective and predictive, there are many problems should been solved, such as pre-operative planning, intra-procedural target localization, precise and consistent placement of the tissue ablator device, and quantitative procedure evaluations. In response to these limitations, we propose the use of a robotic system.Robotic system for surgery is a kind of computer-integrated surgery (CIS) system. These systems transform preoperative images and other information into models of individual patients, assist clinicians in developing an optimized interventional plan, register this preoperative data to the actual patient in the operating room, and then use a variety of means, such as robots and image navigation, to assist in the accurate execution of the planned interventions. Finally, they perform complex postoperative analysis of the interventions.Ultrasound-guided percutaneous microwave ablation is an ideal setting to make use of robotic system. Improved real-time guidance for planning, delivering, and monitoring the ablative therapy would provide the missing tool needed to allow accurate and effective application of this promising therapy. It is believed that robotic system can ultimately make these procedures significantly more accurate, more effective and safer. Currently, no commercial Robotic system is applied in ultrasound-guided ablation therapy. Such systems only exist in the academic domain. So build a full robotic system would be of significant benefit to the broad community of scientists, engineers and doctors who develop these systems and use them to improve patients' lives.In this dissertation we first present the underlying theory for the roboticsystem. This theoretical foundation provides the ability to fully specify the technologies required for the system. Building on this foundation, we design a robotic system for ultrasound-guided percutaneous microwave ablation. And then we make some initial experiments using phantoms to verify and determine the accuracy of the system.A whole work-flow of the robotic system for ultrasound-guided percutaneous microwave ablation was completed and a passive robot was designed and a series of empirical studies were made in this study. This project demonstrates that the efficacy of ultrasound-guided percutaneous microwave ablation could be enhanced with the use of robotic system and this technique may become a stable and precise method of operation for clinical therapy.