Design and evaluation setup of a novel steerable flexible needle for percutaneous therapy

Recently, flexible needles with bevel tips for percutaneous intervention have attracted significant interest. However, there are remaining problems related to controlling by duty-cycle algorithm which prevents widespread adoption of this technology. This motivates development of a new steerable flexible needle model that can change its curvature without axial rotation. In this paper, we propose a new steerable flexible needle design including two parts: cannula and stylet. An inserting system was developed to control the needle. To measure the curvature, a calibrated camera was deployed, and then the obtained images and videos were analyzed using Matlab. Using this setup, we will perform a series of experiment to evaluate the performance of the proposed steerable flexible needle.