| Summary: | Background: Minimally invasive procedures are rapidly growing in popularity thanks to advancements in medical robots, visual navigation and space registration techniques. This paper presents a precise and efficient targeting method for robot-assisted percutaneous needle placement under C-arm fluoroscopy. Method: A special end-effector was constructed to perform fluoroscopy calibration and robot to image-space registration simultaneously and automatically. In addition, formulations were given to compute the movement of robot targeting and evaluate targeting accuracy using only one X-ray image. Result: A pre-clinical experiment showed that the maximum angle error was 0.94° and the maximum position error of a target located 80 mm below the end-effector was 1.31 mm. And evaluation of the system in a robot-assisted pedicle screws placement surgery has justified the accuracy and reliability of proposed method in clinical applications. Conclusion: The positioning accuracy was increased by using present method. Moreover, radiation exposure and operation time were reduced significantly compared to other commonly used methods.
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