title: Experimental evaluation of co-manipulated ultrasound-guided flexible needle steering.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  A teleoperation system for bevel-tipped flexible needle steering has been evaluated. Robotic systems have been exploited as the main tool to achieve high accuracy and reliability. However, for reasons of safety and acceptance by the surgical community, keeping the physician tightly in the loop is preferable.
  
  
  METHODS
  The system uses ultrasound imaging, path planning, and control to compute the desired needle orientation during the insertion and intuitively passes this information to the operator, who teleoperates the motion of the needle's tip. Navigation cues about the computed orientation are provided through haptic and visual feedback to the operator to steer the needle.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The targeting accuracy of several co-manipulation strategies were studied in four sets of experiments involving human subjects with clinical backgrounds.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Experimental results show that receiving feedback regarding the desired needle orientation improves the targeting accuracy by a factor of 9 with respect to manual insertions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
authors.affiliation: MIRA-Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, Department of Biomechanical Engineering, Surgical Robotics Laboratory, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Momen
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Abayazid
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, and with the Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy.
authors.forename: Claudio
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pacchierotti
authors.affiliation: MIRA-Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, Department of Biomechanical Engineering, Surgical Robotics Laboratory, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Moreira
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Alterovitz
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, and with the Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy.
authors.forename: Domenico
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Prattichizzo
authors.affiliation: MIRA-Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, Department of Biomechanical Engineering, Surgical Robotics Laboratory, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.|Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Groningen and University Medical Centre, Groningen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Sarthak
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Misra
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D005246:Feedback; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009339:Needles; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods; D012984:Software; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods*; D014463:Ultrasonography / Q000379:methods*
keywords: haptics; needle steering; shared control; ultrasound-guidance