Surgical Robotics - Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot (MINIR)
Brain tumors are among the most feared complications of cancer and they occur in 20-40% of adult cancer patients. Despite numerous advances in treatment, the prognosis for these patients is poor, with a median survival of 4-8 months. The primary reasons for poor survival rate are the lack of good continuous imaging modality for intraoperative intracranial procedures and the inability to remove the complete tumor tissue due to its placement in the brain and the corresponding space constraints to reach it. To overcome the above limitations, we envision developing a Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot (MINIR), which would be operated in an intraoperative MRI environment. We envision MINIR to be under the direct control of a human operator, with targeting information obtained exclusively from frequently-updated MRI. MINIR will be fully MRI compatible, so that frequently-updated MRI can be used to provide virtual visualization of the target by the human operator as the target's 3-dimensional shape changes during tumor removal.
Relevant Publications:
- Nicholas Pappafotis, Wojciech Bejgerowski, Rao Gullapalli, Marc Simard, Satyandra K. Gupta, and Jaydev P. Desai, “Towards Design and Fabrication of a miniature MRI-compatible Robot for Applications in Neurosurgery”, Proceedings of the ASME 2008 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC/CIE, 2008.