Needle path planning in semiautonomous and teleoperated robot‐assisted epidural anaesthesia procedure: A proof of concept

BACKGROUND: Epidural anaesthesia is a Percutaneous Procedure (PP) which plays a crucial role in surgical procedures, where accurate needle insertion is still challenging. The objective of this work is to present a Tuohy needle path planning, which allows an anaesthesiologist to drive semiautonomously, with the assistance of a teleoperated robot, the tip of the needle during this PP. METHODS: We capture, analysed and modelled the anaesthetist hands' motion during the execution of this procedure, by synthetising, programing and simulating a parametrised and normalised kinematic constrains dependent on an insertion variable in a virtual robot. RESULTS: Two preoperative path planning models were obtained, which provide a teleoperated robot with kinematic constraints to semiautonomously drive a Tuohy needle in the epidural anaesthesia procedure. CONCLUSIONS: A semiautonomous robot can assist in the execution of this PP using the kinematic constraints obtained from the study of the movement of a specialist's hands.