Simulation of Surgical Needle Insertion

Nuttapong Chentanez, Ron Alterovitz, Jijie Xu, Vincent Duindam, Ken Goldberg, James O'Brien

Steerable needles composed of a highly flexible material and with a bevel tip offer greater mobility compared to rigid needles for minimally invasive medical procedures. Because the needle has a bevel tip, it will trace out a curve path inside the tissue. By rotating the based, the needle could be steered to avoid vital organs. Computer simulation of the interaction between the needle and the human tissue can be useful in helping surgeon plan the procedures.

In this project, we consider the problem of 3D simulation of needle insertion procedures, where we use physically based approaches to model the needle flexibility and the tissue deformation. Our simulation method uses a tetrahedral mesh to represent the tissue and a chain of nodes to represent needle. We maintain a collocation property of the chain and the mesh. The chain contains only connected nodes and edges in the tetrahedral mesh. The tissue and the needle are simulated and coupled in real-time. In addition to developing the simulation method, we also plan to explore the planning aspect of the steerable needle insertion to robustly reach the target region while avoiding vital organs.

Needle and Prostate model