Motion Planning for Medical Applications
Project Description
In radiosurgery a moving beam of radiation is used as an ablative
surgical instrument to destroy brain tumors. Classical radiosurgical
systems rely on rigid skeletal fixation of the anatomic region to be
treated. This fixation procedure is very painful for the patient and
limits radiosurgical procedures to brain lesions. Furthermore, due to
the necessity of rigid fixation, radiosurgical treatment with
classical systems cannot be fractionated. A new camera-guided radiosurgical system capable of
tracking patient motion during treatment has been built to overcome
these problems. The radiation source is moved by a six
degree-of-freedom robotic arm. In addition to offering a more cost
effective, less invasive, and less painful treatment, the robotic
gantry allows for arbitrary spatial motion of the radiation
source. Based on this feature we can treat non-spherical lesions with
accuracies unachievable with classical radiosurgical systems. The
system introduces a new class of radiosurgical procedures, called
non-stereotactic, or image-guided radiosurgery. At the heart of these
procedures are algorithms for planning both a treatment and the
corresponding beam motion, given the geometric description of the
tumor shape and relative locations in the particular case.
Project Group:
Departments of Neurosurgery and Robotics Laboratory
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.
Recent Publications
- ( "Planning for Camera-Guided Radiosurgery",
Submitted to: IEEE Trans. Rob. Autom.
)
- ( "Robotic Radiosurgery with Beams of Adaptable Shapes",
in: LNCS 905, Computer Vision and Robotics in Medicine, N. Ayache
(ed.), 1995. )
- ( "Planning, Calibration and Collision Avoidance for Image-Guided Radiosurgery,"
Proc. IEEE Workshop Int. Robots and Systems, 854-861, 1994. )
- "Treatment Planning for a Radiosurgical System with General Kinematics,"
Proc. IEEE Conf. Robotics & Automation, 1994.
New web page for Achim Schweikard is here.
Please send questions and comments to achim@flamingo.stanford.edu