Cancer represents one of the main causes of death nowadays, due to a complex set of uncontrollable natural and artificial factors. Huge efforts have been made by the entire scientific community to provide better cancer treatment solutions, all aiming to improve survival and life expectancy. An innovative option in the fight against cancer is brachytherapy (BT), called also internal radiation. BT enables to deliver higher doses of radiation to more-specific areas of the body, compared with the conventional form of radiation therapy that projects radiation from a machine outside the body. The paper presents the structural synthesis of suitable innovative parallel robots used in brachytherapy.

The paper presents the design and simulation of a new 5-DOF parallel robot named PARA-BRACHYROB used for brachytherapy. Brachytherapy (BT) is an advanced cancer treatment technique, where radioactive seeds are delivered directly in the tumor without damaging the proximal healthy tissues. Due to the tremendous therapeutic potential of brachytherapy, many researches are encouraged to provide solutions for enhanced placement of BT devices inside the patient body, thus further developing brachytherapy robotic systems. Therefore the paper presents an innovative CT-Scan compatible robotic device for this application. The PARA-BRACHYROB system consists of a parallel robot with five degrees of freedom (DOF) for needle positioning and orientation up to the insertion point in the patient body and a 1-DOF mechanism for the needle insertion. The kinematic models of PARA-BRACHYROB are presented and validated through a multi-body simulation including a short description of the numerical and simulation results for the developed model.

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