Advanced Planning and Ultrasound Guidance for Keyhole Neurosurgery in ROBOCAST

ROBOCAST is a European, multinational project comprising nine scientific partners from the communities of neurological and neurosurgical science, medical robotics, computer-assisted surgery and medical imaging. In three years run-time, a prototype system for advanced robotassisted neurosurgery is designed and implemented. The system will feature several components. At its core, there is a combination of two robots, one robot with a large working volume that is used for gross-positioning of a smaller robot near the situs, where in total a sub-millimetric targeting accuracy is aimed to be reached. Together with actuators for a linear and – as a novelty – a flexible biomimetic probe, the system is designed for reaching single and multiple targets in the brain. The three main applications chosen for demonstration purposes are Brain Biopsy, Multi-Target Treatment and Deep Brain Stimulation. In this paper, we mainly focus on reporting of several software aspects of the proposed system, namely advanced pre-operative planning, automated probe trajectory proposition, incorporation of system and tracking uncertainty and usage of ultrasound for visualization and guidance.     «

ROBOCAST is a European, multinational project comprising nine scientific partners from the communities of neurological and neurosurgical science, medical robotics, computer-assisted surgery and medical imaging. In three years run-time, a prototype system for advanced robotassisted neurosurgery is designed and implemented. The system will feature several components. At its core, there is a combination of two robots, one robot with a large working volume that is used for gross-positioning of a sma...     »