Non-Metallic MR-Guided Concentric Tube Robot for Intracerebral Hemorrhage Evacuation

We aim to develop and evaluate an MR-conditional concentric tube robot for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) evacuation.

We fabricated the concentric tube robot hardware with plastic tubes and customized pneumatic motors. The robot kinematic model was developed using a discretized piece-wise constant curvature (D-PCC) approach to account for variable curvature along the tube shape, and tube mechanics model was used to compensate torsional deflection of the inner tube. The MR-safe pneumatic motors were controlled using a variable gain PID algorithm. The robot hardware was validated in a series of bench-top and MRI experiments, and the robot's evacuation efficacy was tested in MR-guided phantom trials.

The pneumatic motor was able to achieve a rotational accuracy of 0.32°±0.30° with the proposed variable gain PID control algorithm. The kinematic model provided a positional accuracy of the tube tip of 1.39 ± 0.54 mm. The robot was able to evacuate an initial 38.36 mL clot, leaving a residual hematoma of 8.14 mL after 5 minutes, well below the 15 mL guideline suggesting good post-ICH evacuation clinical outcomes.

This robotic platform provides an effective method for MR-guided ICH evacuation.

ICH evacuation is feasible under MRI guidance using a plastic concentric tube, indicating potential feasibility in future live animal studies.