Hand-held steerable needle device

This paper presents a novel handheld device for steerable needle insertions for minimally invasive percutaneous procedures. Controlled lateral deflection of over 30mm during a 100mm axial insertion is demonstrated with a 20 gauge needle. A handheld, motorized device has been built to control the direction and rate of steering according to a two-axis miniature joystick input. To facilitate interventions with this steerable needle, two methods of locating the needle and its tip using ultrasound imaging are presented. One uses needle tip vibration for colour/power Doppler-based localization, the other is based on real-time segmentation of B-mode images.