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Toward Transoral Peripheral Lung Access: Combining Continuum Robots and Steerable Needles

Lung cancer is the most deadly form of cancer in part because of the challenges associated with accessing nodules for diagnosis and therapy. Transoral access is preferred to percutaneous access since it has a lower risk of lung collapse, yet many sites are currently unreachable transorally due to limitations with current bronchoscopic instruments. Toward this end, we present a new robotic system for image-guided trans-bronchoscopic lung access. The system uses a bronchoscope to navigate in the airway and bronchial tubes to a site near the desired target, a concentric tube robot to move through the bronchial wall and aim at the target, and a bevel-tip steerable needle with magnetic tracking to maneuver through lung tissue to the target under closed-loop control. In this work, we illustrate the workflow of our system and show accurate targeting in phantom experiments. Ex vivo porcine lung experiments show that our steerable needle can be tuned to achieve appreciable curvature in lung tissue. Lastly, we present targeting results with our system using two scenarios based on patient cases. In these experiments, phantoms were created from patient-specific computed tomography information and our system was used to target the locations of suspicious nodules, illustrating the ability of our system to reach sites that are traditionally inaccessible transorally.