Robot-assisted mechanical scanning and co-registration of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and light-induced fluorescence

Robotic manipulators offer some unique opportunities to address research and clinical needs. Among those is the potential use of a robotic manipulator to mechanically scan the tissue of interest with biosensors that have limited tissue penetration. In such cases, the robot can serve a dual role. First, it can perform spatial scanning with the biosensor along a pre-selected path inside the tissue. Second, it can function as the mechanical link to spatially co-register the data collected with the biosensor and the images of a guidance modality. Herein, we describe a robotic system to mechanically scan with a light-induced fluorescence (LIF) sensor and co-register LIF data to the guiding modality of MRI. Specifically, a custom-built MR-compatible endoscope was integrated onto the end-effector of an MR-compatible manipulator to collect MRI-guided LIF 1D scans. A miniature radiofrequency (RF) coil attached onto the end-effector was used as a fiducial marker for co-registering LIF and MRI. This mechanically scanning system was investigated on two compartment phantoms, each with different optical agents. Those studies demonstrated “robot-assisted” multi-modality co-registration, i.e. the spatial distribution of the LIF signals matched with the MR guiding images. The system can incorporate additional sensors for collecting complementary biochemical information.