Construction and verification of a safety region for brain tumor removal with a telesurgical robot system

Abstract

Background: The authors propose and verify a method for the construction of a safety region for minimally invasive brain tumor removal. The safety region is constructed to avoid damaging normal tissues through the movement of a robotic instrument during brain tumor surgery using a telesurgical robotic system and a small port. Material and methods: 3 D boundaries of a tumor and a port were generated as a critical wall to avoid invading normal tissues through an image processing algorithm with consideration of a safe margin. Then, fast collision detection between the boundary and the robotic instrument was continuously performed to monitor the movement of the robotic instrument. Results: An experiment was conducted using the prototype of a telesurgical robot system and a hemispherical phantom. A 3 D boundary was generated from the CT images of the phantom with a safe margin of 2.76 mm. The robotic instrument did not penetrate the boundary. Conclusion: The experimental result shows that our method can contribute toward safe brain tumor removal with robotic surgery.