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.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea Government (MSIP) (No. 2011-0030075).
Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.