Image Navigation System for Surgical Robots

This is a course assignment project that calculates the optimal trajectory for needle insertion in 3D Slicer. It then commands a ROS robot model to perform the action.

This program is designed for and only tested on a fake brain dataset specific for my course. However, in theory it should also works in other senarios if the input is in the right format. The program requires two vtkMRMLMarkupsFiducialNode instances as the entry and target candidate respectively, as well as two vtkMRMLLabelMapVolumeNode instances representing critical structures (e.g., blood vessels) to be avoided. The algorithm will return a vtkMRMLLinearTransformNode, which you need to push into the ROS environment using OpenIGTLink.

Instructions

Step 1

1. Open 3D Slicer.
2. Import your entries, targets, vessels, and ventricles.
3. In the Python terminal, run the following commands:

exec(open(your_path/PathPlanning.py').read())  
best_path, max_d = findpath('entries_name', 'targets_name', 'vessels_name', 'ventricles_name', max_length=infinity, scale_rate=1)

• You can set max_length to any value and scale_rate to any integer.
• Note: A larger scale_rate can result in a significant performance loss.
• Warning: The findpath() function uses all available CPU threads for concurrency. While this can speed up the calculation, it may also freeze your computer temporarily, for a period of minutes or even hours. This is normal and you should not force quit 3D Slicer during this process.

gettransform('entry', 'target', patient_position=[0,0,0])

• You can set a different patient_position for a better path.

4. Open OpenIGTLinkIF and establish a connection with the Ubuntu machine running ROS.

Step 2

1. Construct a ROS workspace and place the MyBot folder within this space.
2. Open a terminal and run the following commands:

source your_workspace_path/devel/setup.bash  
roslaunch MyBot demo.launch

3. Open another terminal and run the following commands:

source your_workspace_path/devel/setup.bash  
rosrun MyBot PoseGoal0.2.py

4. Follow the instructions in the terminal. You should be able to observe the movement in RViz, the window opened in Step 2.2.

Please remember to replace the placeholders (e.g., 'your_path', 'entries_name', etc.) with your actual values before using these instructions.

For detailed description of this project, please refer to the Image-guided Robotic Navigation Final Report.pdf file under the root directory.