Study of needle punctures into soft tissue through audio and force sensing: can audio be a simple alternative for needle guidance?

Abstract

Purpose Percutaneous needle insertion is one of the most common minimally invasive procedures. The clinician’s experience and medical imaging support are essential to the procedure’s safety. However, imaging comes with inaccuracies due to artifacts, and therefore sensor-based solutions were proposed to improve accuracy. However, sensors are usually embedded in the needle tip, leading to design limitations. A novel concept was proposed for capturing tip–tissue interaction information through audio sensing, showing promising results for needle guidance. This work demonstrates that this audio approach can provide important puncture information by comparing audio and force signal dynamics during insertion. Methods An experimental setup for inserting a needle into soft tissue was prepared. Audio and force signals were synchronously recorded at four different insertion velocities, and a dataset of 200 recordings was acquired. Indicators related to different aspects of the force and audio were compared through signal-to-signal and event-to-event correlation analysis. Results High signal-to-signal correlations between force and audio indicators regardless of the insertion velocity were obtained. The force curvature indicator obtained the best correlation performances to audio with more than $$70\%$$ 70 % of the correlations higher than 0.6. The event-to-event correlation analysis shows that a puncture event in the force is generally identifiable in audio and that their intensities firmly related. Conclusions Audio contains valuable information for monitoring needle tip/tissue interaction. Significant dynamics obtained from a well-known sensor as force can also be extracted from audio, regardless of insertion velocities.

Toward autonomous robotic-assisted interventions: the value of proximally placed audio-sensors for surface and event characterization

“…Additionally, the different users produced similar audio responses. It is quite obvious from the results that all of them have a very unique audio profile, particularly with respect to the frequency spectrum and the pole energy [15,16] Additionally, the original signal obtained without preprocessing or filtering was not able to display the event details.…”

“…Figure7: The displayed results show the original and filtered signal, TV-AR spectrum and the maximum pole energy for a constant speed/force needle insertion experiment entering PERSIMMON, GRAPE, CHICKEN BREAST, and CHICKEN LIVER that were embedded in a gelatin phantom. It is quite obvious that all of them have a very unique audio profile particularly the frequency spectrum and the pole energy[15,16].…”

Vibro-Acoustic Sensing of Instrument Interactions as a Potential Source of Texture-Related Information in Robotic Palpation

“…The former interpretation by the surgeon is replaced by a signal-processing and analysis strategy dependent on the specific procedure and context. The feasibility of the approach for the extraction of guidance information was shown for percutaneous needle interventions [ 28 , 29 , 30 ] and catheter-based procedures [ 31 , 32 ]. With respect to an application in RMIS, the potential to extract information related to the surface texture of a palpated object or tissue was explored in [ 33 , 34 , 35 ].…”