Desai Awarded $1.27M NIH Grant
September 19, 2008
The goal of this project is to develop a novel teleoperated robotic system with haptic (sense of touch) feedback capability that will provide accurate feedback to the physician performing breast biopsy (Bx) and/or radio-frequency ablation (RFA) under continuous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Some of the primary challenges of this project include: development of a compact robot manipulator; actuation and sensing that is MRI compatible; efficient use of MRI image sequences to guide the Bx needle and/or RFA probe accurately using adaptive control schemes that incorporate soft-tissue properties as the needle/probe traverses the tissue; and an intuitive user-interface which will provide real-time MRI images and Bx needle/RFA probe tracking with respect to the tumor (target) location.