Needles are a fundamental tool used in many interventional medical procedures as a minimally invasive method for traversing tissue en route to the target site. However, in most cases, navigating the need through living tissues to an intratissue target safely and accurately can be challenging or infeasible due to various reasons, such as anatomical obstacles and natural tissue motion. To overcome these challenges and enhance patient care and safety, scientists from the University of North Carolina introduced a medical robot that autonomously inserts a needle to intratissue target by navigating through obstacles. The robot leverages a flexible steerable needle that can follow curvilinear trajectories to avoid obstacles for reach anatomical regions that are inaccessible using rigid straight instruments. Clinical feasibility was demonstrated through a series of in vivo lung experiments performed by the team. The pervasiveness of obstacles in the tissue and the continuous influence of respiratory motion make lung one of the most difficult organs for the application of autonomous medical robot. Nevertheless, the team accomplished an intraparenchymal in vivo procedure by deploying a steerable needle. The deployment of steerable needle actually consists of three stages: creating a geometric model of the patient’s anatomy through CT scan, planning three to five candidate routes via motion planning, and finally executing the plan via manual control, teleoperation, and automation. The results of experiments were indicative, confirming the accessibility of steerable needle to targets in the lung for diagnosis or treatment beyond the safe reach of existing tools. Medical robots with autonomous capabilities are expected to improve medical outcomes, specifically in early lung cancer diagnosis.

Reference:

Kuntz A, et al. Sci Robot. 2023 Sep 20;8(82):eadf7614.