Needle guidance in soft tissue

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Image-guided placement of flexible probes and needles into a deformable target medium is ubiquitous in manufacturing, tissue engineering, cell manipulation, and perhaps with the most impact, in medicine. Needle-based biopsies, injections and implantations are performed by the millions in Canada. In current practice, needles often fail to reach the intended target and/or cause excessive injury. It involves many fundamental scientific challenges to navigate a needle into a moving target embedded in a soft and deformable medium, without causing collateral tissue damage. I propose a novel combination of computing and imaging to make needle placement in soft tissues safer and more accurate. In particular, I will develop novel ultrasound image computing methods and probabilistic target displacement models in planning the optimal needle trajectory. The methods will be evaluated in the context of an ultrasound-guided robot-assisted needle placement system I have developed previously. The outcome of this research will be new computing methods and software implementations that have the potential to increase the accuracy of surgical needle insertion procedures, while also making them less traumatic for the patient. This program will train two PhD, four MSc and ten undergraduate students in leading edge computer science research with applications in biomedical engineering.