Secoli Riccardo, Robinson Matthew, Brugnoli Michele, Rodriguez y Baena Ferdinando
The Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK.
The Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK
Proc Inst Mech Eng H. 2015 Mar;229(3):215-24. doi: 10.1177/0954411915574306.
To perform minimally invasive surgical interventions with the aid of robotic systems within a magnetic resonance imaging scanner offers significant advantages compared to conventional surgery. However, despite the numerous exciting potential applications of this technology, the introduction of magnetic resonance imaging-compatible robotics has been hampered by safety, reliability and cost concerns: the robots should not be attracted by the strong magnetic field of the scanner and should operate reliably in the field without causing distortion to the scan data. Development of non-conventional sensors and/or actuators is thus required to meet these strict operational and safety requirements. These demands commonly result in expensive actuators, which mean that cost effectiveness remains a major challenge for such robotic systems. This work presents a low-cost, high-field-strength magnetic resonance imaging-compatible actuator: a pneumatic stepper motor which is controllable in open loop or closed loop, along with a rotary encoder, both fully manufactured in plastic, which are shown to perform reliably via a set of in vitro trials while generating negligible artifacts when imaged within a standard clinical scanner.
借助机器人系统在磁共振成像扫描仪内进行微创手术与传统手术相比具有显著优势。然而，尽管这项技术有众多令人兴奋的潜在应用，但磁共振成像兼容机器人的引入却受到安全、可靠性和成本问题的阻碍：机器人不应被扫描仪的强磁场吸引，并且应在该磁场中可靠运行而不导致扫描数据失真。因此，需要开发非常规传感器和/或致动器来满足这些严格的操作和安全要求。这些需求通常会导致致动器成本高昂，这意味着成本效益仍然是此类机器人系统的一大挑战。这项工作展示了一种低成本、高场强的磁共振成像兼容致动器：一种气动步进电机，它可以开环或闭环控制，还配备一个旋转编码器，两者均完全由塑料制成，通过一组体外试验表明其运行可靠，并且在标准临床扫描仪内成像时产生的伪影可忽略不计。
