A model to predict deflection of bevel-tipped active needle advancing in soft tissue

Active needles are recently being developed to improve steerability and placement accuracy for various medical applications. These active needles can bend during insertion by actuators attached to their bodies. The bending of active needles enables them to be steered away from the critical organs on the way to target and accurately reach target locations previously unachievable with conventional rigid needles. These active needles combined with an asymmetric bevel-tip can further improve their steerability. To optimize the design and to develop accurate path planning and control algorithms, there is a need to develop a tissue–needle interaction model. This work presents an energy-based model that predicts needle deflection of active bevel-tipped needles when inserted into the tissue. This current model was based on an existing energy-based model for bevel-tipped needles, to which work of actuation was included in calculating the system energy. The developed model was validated with needle insertion experiments with a phantom material. The model predicts needle deflection reasonably for higher diameter needles (11.6% error), whereas largest error was observed for the smallest needle diameter (24.7% error).