Visual servoing for automatic and uncalibrated needle placement for percutaneous procedures

This paper presents a new approach to image-based guidance of a needle or surgical tool during percutaneous procedures. The method is based on visual servoing. It requires no prior calibration or registration. The technique provides highly precise 3D-alignment of the tool with respect to an anatomic target. By taking advantage of projective geometry and projective invariants, this can be achieved in a fixed number (12) of iterations. In addition the approach estimates the required insertion depth. Experiments include automatic 3D alignment and insertion of a needle held by a medical robot into a pig kidney under X-ray fluoroscopy.