Seminar 2007 03 07 Needle Steering

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CISST ERC Seminar
Towards Image-Guided Control of Needle Steering

Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Maryland 110 (Lunch will be served)

Speaker: Vinutha Kallem
Title: Towards Image-Guided Control of Needle Steering
Presentation: PDF, not yet uploaded

Abstract

Physicians perform percutaneous therapies in many diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Image guidance promises to improve targeting accuracy and broaden the scope of needle interventions. In this work, we consider the possibility of automating the guidance of a flexible bevel-tip needle as it is inserted into tissue. We build upon a previously proposed needle steering model to develop a nonlinear observer-based controller. As a first step for control, we show that flexible needles can be automatically controlled to remain within a planar slice of tissue as they are inserted into the tissue. This work has also inspired our work on "task-specific reduction" of kinematic systems into lower-dimensional sub-systems. We propose a method to perform such reductions for generic nonholonomic kinematic systems.

Bio

Vinutha Kallem is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University. She works at the LIMBS laboratory under the guidance of Prof. Noah Cowan. Prior to this, she received her B.S. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and M.S. from Stanford University, all in Mechanical Engineering. Vinutha's research interests include nonholonomic control and visual servoing.