Medical needle steering for lung biopsy: Experimental results in tissue phantoms using a robotic needle driver

Needle steering is a commonly used technique in the medical field as it enables physicians to more precisely reach the target tissue. In this paper we describe our interest in needle steering for lung biopsy and the significance of this technique. There has been much interest in modeling needle steering in recent years and this paper builds upon that work. We describe our Matlab implementation and present simulation results. We also show our experimental results based on a robotic needle driver and X-Ray imaging in the interventional suite. The experimental results showed good agreement with the simulation results.