Evaluation of Needle Manipulation Controller Subject to Uncertainty of Tip Pose Feedback: A Simulation Study

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of our controller for flexible needle manipulation for percutaneous interventions in a finite element (FE) simulator. We investigate the use of electromagnetic (EM) tracking as needle tip pose feedback, and how artificial sensor noises can affect tracking performance of the controller. In our simulated study, the control system shows high targeting accuracy and robustness with an overall tip position error of 0.49mm. The addition of needle tip orientation feedback further improves the targeting accuracy for deeper targets, with average error of 0.81mm when only using position feedback, and 0.55mm when using additional orientation feedback.