Research on robotic technologies for ultrasound guided radio frequency ablation surgery

The ultrasonic imaging aided minimally invasive surgery imposes a constraint for surgeons to have high precision in their hand eye coordination. A possible solution to reduce these requirements is robot aided minimally invasive surgery in which the instrument is guided by visual feedback towards the goal defined by the surgeon in the ultrasonic imaging. Minimally invasive surgery robot of five degrees freedom has been developed for assisting surgeons to realize high quality and precise operation in radio frequency ablation for patients with liver tumors. The minimally invasive surgery robot drives the ablator tool to track the tumor when the tumor moves in real time and precise orientate to the tumor. Through studying of the minimally invasive ablation surgical operation, we have determined the robot assist surgical operation system. The mechanism and the control system have been designed according to the requirements and the safety of the patients and the surgeons. The experiments results have shown that the determined parameters of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and the control system meet the requirements of the ablation surgical robot.