MRI-guided lumbar spinal injections with body-mounted robotic system: cadaver studies

Abstract

Introduction

This paper reports the system integration and cadaveric assessment of a body-mounted robotic system for MRI-guided lumbar spine injections. The system is developed to enable MR-guided interventions in closed bore magnet and avoid problems due to patient movement during cannula guidance.

Material and methods

The robot is comprised by a lightweight and compact structure so that it can be mounted directly onto the lower back of a patient using straps. Therefore, it can minimize the influence of patient movement by moving with the patient. The MR-Conditional robot is integrated with an image-guided surgical planning workstation. A dedicated clinical workflow is created for the robot-assisted procedure to improve the conventional freehand MRI-guided procedure.

Results

Cadaver studies were performed with both freehand and robot-assisted approaches to validate the feasibility of the clinical workflow and to assess the positioning accuracy of the robotic system. The experiment results demonstrate that the root mean square (RMS) error of the target position to be 2.57 ± 1.09 mm and of the insertion angle to be 2.17 ± 0.89°.

Conclusion

The robot-assisted approach is able to provide more accurate and reproducible cannula placements than the freehand procedure, as well as to reduce the number of insertion attempts.

Keywords:

• MR image-guided therapy
• lumbar spine injections
• body-mounted robot
• MRI-guided robot

Acknowledgements

This study is funded by National Institutes of Health grant R01EB025179 and R01EB020003. We want to thank Lukasz Priba, Helen Donald-Simpson, Joyce Joy, Andrew Dennison, Yuting Ling, and Ross Coupar at University of Dundee, who helped with the cadaver studies.

Declaration of interest

All authors declared that they have no conflict of interest.