Designing, implementing and integrating a controller for the MRI compatible robotic breast biopsy system

One of the breast cancer screening and diagnosis methods is MRI-guided breast biopsy. Current techniques have limitations in accuracy and efficiency, which may cause lesions to be missed. In order to tackle this problem, a pneumatically actuated 5 DOF MRI compatible robot is integrated with an electronic valve manifold and a graphical user interface to target fish oil capsules (mimicking lesions) in breast phantoms inside a 0.25T MRI scanner. Measurements with the scanner have shown that the robot without needle has no measurable influence on MRI scans. When equipped with an off-the-shelf titanium needle, artifacts are present in the vicinity of the needle when inserted into tissue. Preliminary needle positioning measurements show that the accuracy is in the order of (4.7 - 7.3 mm) and that there is a decrease in the time of the MRI-guided localization procedure.