Angular needle tracker and stabilizer for image-guided interventions

Minimally invasive image-guided interventions have changed the face of procedural medicine. For these procedures, safety and efficacy depend on precise needle placement. Needle targeting devices help improve the accuracy of needle placement, but their use has not seen broad penetration. Some of these devices are costly and require major modifications to the clinical workflow. In this article, we developed a low-cost, disposable, and easy-to-use angulation tracking device, which was based on a redesigned commercial passive needle holder.

The new design provided real-time angulation information for needle tracking. In this design, two potentiometers were used as angulation sensors, and they were connected to two axes of the passive needle holder's arch structure through a 3 D-printed bridge structure. A control unit included an Arduino Pro Mini, a Bluetooth module, and two rechargeable batteries. The angulation was calculated and communicated in real time to a novel developed smartphone app, where real-time angulation information was displayed for guiding the operator to position the needle to the planned angles.

The open-air test results showed that the average errors are 1.03° and 1.08° for left-right angulation and head-foot angulation, respectively. The animal cadaver tests revealed that the novel system had an average angular error of 3.2° and a radial distance error of 3.1 mm.

The accuracy was comparable with some commercially available solutions. The novel and low-cost needle tracking device may find a role as part of a real-time precision approach to both planning and implementation of image-guided therapies.