Design and evaluation setup of a novel steerable flexible needle for percutaneous therapy

摘要

Recently, flexible needles with bevel tips for percutaneous intervention have attracted significant interest. However, there are remaining problems related to controlling by duty-cycle algorithm which prevents widespread adoption of this technology. This motivates development of a new steerable flexible needle model that can change its curvature without axial rotation. In this paper, we propose a new steerable flexible needle design including two parts: cannula and stylet. An inserting system was developed to control the needle. To measure the curvature, a calibrated camera was deployed, and then the obtained images and videos were analyzed using Matlab. Using this setup, we will perform a series of experiment to evaluate the performance of the proposed steerable flexible needle.