Medical robotics and fluoroscopy servoing: automating needle placement for spine procedures

This paper begins with an overview of medical robotics and then describes an algorithm for automatic needle placement using a six degree of freedom (DOF) robot during minimally invasive spine procedures. The term fluoroscopy servoing is given to this process since an x-ray fluoroscope is used as the visualization tool. A software application was developed to segment the needle in the x-ray images to find its position, which is then used as feedback to control the robot and move it to a desired target pint. Twenty trials were performed in a cadaver study and the robot reached the desired target point with an average distance error of 1.21mm.