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Updated: Apr 13, 2026
Surgical Technique for Spinal Cord Delivery of Therapies: Demonstration of Procedure in Gottingen Minipigs
Published on: December 7, 2012
Simulation-based Flexible Needle Control with Single-core FBG Feedback for Spinal Injections
Yanzhou Wang1, Yangsheng Xu2, Jiarong Kang2
1Department of Mechanical Engineering and Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Objective:
We present a general framework of simultaneous needle shape reconstruction and control input generation for robot-assisted spinal injection procedures, without continuous imaging feedback.
Methods:
System input-output mapping is generated with a real-time needle-tissue interaction simulation, and single-core FBG sensor readings are used as local needle shape feedback within the same simulation framework. FBG wavelength shifts due to temperature variation is removed by exploiting redundancy in fiber arrangement.
Results:
Targeting experiments performed on both plastisol lumbar phantoms as well as an ex vivo porcine lumbar section achieved in-plane tip errors of and , and total tip errors of and for the two testing environments.
Significance:
Our clinically inspired control strategy and workflow is self-contained and not dependent on the modality of imaging guidance. The generalizability of the proposed approach can be applied to other needle-based interventions where medical imaging cannot be reliably utilized as part of a closed-loop control system for needle guidance.
