The biomechanics of percutaneous needle insertion.

Emphasis has been placed on improving patient outcomes in healthcare management. Significant patient morbidity and mortality exists from inappropriate procedural technique and percutaneous catheter needle insertion procedures have been linked to medical complications. Healthcare trainees learn these procedures through trial and error and most existing simulators are synthetic tissue based and lack in-vivo force feedback. We seek to utilize the Blue DRAGON instrument positioning system coupled with a force sensor to determine true forces experienced by a needle as it is passed through animal and human tissues in an effort to design a percutaneous needle insertion simulator that affords the learner with the experience of the true force feedback. Acquiring force displacement measurements of needle insertion is the first step towards development of a computational model of the phenomena. The computational model may be further incorporated into a medical haptic simulator that provides physically based force feedback to the user.