title: Planning Fireworks Trajectories for Steerable Medical Needles to Reduce Patient Trauma.
abstract: Accurate insertion of needles to targets in 3D anatomy is required for numerous medical procedures. To reduce patient trauma, a "fireworks" needle insertion approach can be used in which multiple needles are inserted from a single small region on the patient's skin to multiple targets in the tissue. In this paper, we explore motion planning for "fireworks" needle insertion in 3D environments by developing an algorithm based on Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs). Given a set of targets, we propose an algorithm to quickly explore the configuration space by building a forest of RRTs and to find feasible plans for multiple steerable needles from a single entry region. We present two path selection algorithms with different optimality considerations to optimize the final plan among all feasible outputs. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm with a simulation based on a prostate cancer treatment environment.
authors.affiliation: B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. ( jijie.xu@rit.edu ).
authors.forename: Jijie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Duindam
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. ( ron@cs.unc.edu ).
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Alterovitz
authors.affiliation: Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco, USA.
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pouliot
authors.affiliation: Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco, USA.
authors.forename: J Adam M
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Cunha
authors.affiliation: Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco, USA.
authors.forename: I-Chow
authors.initials: IC
authors.lastname: Hsu
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, USA. ( goldberg@berkeley.edu ).
authors.forename: Ken
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Goldberg