Research On Key Technologies Of Remote Control Platform Of Surgical Robot For Lung Cancer Brachytherapy

This paper aims to build a remote surgical robot control platform based on the self-developed surgical robotic system for lung cancer brachytherapy.Researches on functional design and key technologies of the platform were made and a series of experiments were conducted in LAN(Local Area Network)and CT environment.Firstly,the functional requirements of remote control platform were determined by the analysis of the workflow of robot-assisted lung cancer brachytherapy,including support software,remote file transfer,remote robot control and positioning monitor and remote video surveillance.Related key technologies of network communication were also studied preliminarily.Secondly,remote file transfer system was designed and realized.Multithreading technology was introduced based on FTP protocol to increase the efficiency and stability.A partition strategy was put forward that the number of partitions equals to that of threads and the size of the partition is integral multiple of buffer cache size.Meanwhile,each thread independently transfers a partition and a special thread was assigned to update the attribute file at a constant rate.Thirdly,remote surgical robot and positioning monitor system was designed and accomplished.A C/S-Serial-integrated network communication method was proposed.To achieve the remote positioning monitor,electromagnetic positioning technique was applied for position tracking and feature-point-based method was used for intraoperative space registration.In addition,the calibration principle of positioning needle was derived and an improved ICP method(QICP)was proposed for higher accuracy.Meanwhile,network video encoder was introduced to achieve the design of remote video surveillance with the function of two-way voice communication.Finally,a series of experiments on the remote control platform were conducted.In 10 Mbps LAN environment,the average time delay was 19.6 ms and success rate of data package was over 97.2%,results presented good network adaptability.Under the same condition,the speed of file transfer reached 10 MB/s~12 MB/s.In CT environment,total deviation of positioning needle calibration was less than 0.44 mm,QICP method achieved a registration accuracy of 0.87±0.11 mm and the remote robot positioning monitor accuracy was 1.01±0.10 mm,which met the clinical requirements.Experimental results provided the possibility to remotely realize a robot-assisted lung cancer brachytherapy surgery with application of the proposed platform.