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In neurosurgery, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is extensively utilized for preoperative diagnosis and postoperative evaluation due to its superior soft tissue contrast. However, the strong magnetic field poses a challenge to the real-time utilization of MR for intraoperative navigation. To facilitate neurosurgery in the MR environment, this paper develops a MR conditional robot featuring nonferrous materials and ultrasonic motor actuation. The robot consists of a 3-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) translational module and a 3-DOF remote center of motion (RCM) module. The RCM module incorporates a 3-RRR spherical parallel mechanism. The mechanical design and kinematic modeling of the RCM module is completed. This paper further conducts the optimization for the RCM module. Additionally, a path-planning algorithm, focusing on the maximization of dexterity, is introduced, and the feasible workspace of the optimized RCM module is evaluated. A prototype is fabricated, and the orientation repeatability of the RCM module is measured to be 0.055±0.0016∘, and the absolute orientation error is 2.05±0.019∘. Needle insertion experiments are performed on an agarose phantom to evaluate the feasibility of the robot. The impact on signal-to-noise ratio in MRI images caused by the robot is less than 4%, indicating a highly promising applicability in MR conditional neurosurgery.
Qin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.