Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), a subcategory of hemorrhagic strokes, accounts for 20% of total stroke deaths, with a one year mortality rate as high as 65%. Despite the need for urgency, “watchful waiting”, or conservative management, has been a common treatment modality due to the potential cortical disruption and brain shift associated with large craniotomies. However, in recent years, minimally invasive surgery has proven to be a safer alternative to larger, open craniotomies for hemorrhagic clot evacuation and is an increasingly accepted method of treatment for patients with a deep-seated hematoma 30-50 mL in volume. Unfortunately, minimally invasive methods are complicated by lack of adequate visualization, which is necessary to account for brain shift and deformation during the evacuation procedure. In this paper, we develop a plastic MRI-compatible robotic system for MRI-guided ICH removal. This paper presents the first use of off-the-shelf plastic tubes for CTR, and characterizes the robot’s accuracy, MRI-compatibility, and evacuation feasibility for ICH evacuation in phantom trials.
Towards an MRI-Conditional Robot for Intracerebral Hemorrhage Evacuation