MRI-guided robotics at the U of houston: EvolvingMethodologies for interventions and surgeries

Minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) and image guided interventions (IGI) for offering improved patient management and cost effectiveness are witnessed to be rapidly evolving . It is well recognized that sustaining and expand this paradigm shift would require new computational methodology that integrates sensing with multimodal imaging, actively controlled robotic manipulators, the patient and the operator. With this approach, assessing in real-time tissue deformation secondary to the procedure and physiologic motion can be done and on-the-fly update information about the pathophysiology of the targeted tissue can be gathered. This paper investigates the utilization of real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in guiding a procedure. This work is based on current state-of-the-art MR scanners which offer the unique capability to interface it with the robot control computational core. Real time assessment of the area of operation (AoO) with minimal on-line processing and without the need of modeling is realised with this approach. The ability of MRI to effectively manipulate contrast and selectively visualize fast curved and moving structures is discussed.