Background: Epidural anaesthesia is a Percutaneous Procedure (PP) which plays a crucial role in surgical procedures, where accurate needle insertion is still challenging. The objective of this work is to present a Tuohy needle path planning, which allows an anaesthesiologist to drive semiautonomously, with the assistance of a teleoperated robot, the tip of the needle during this PP.
Methods: We capture, analysed and modelled the anaesthetist hands' motion during the execution of this procedure, by synthetising, programing and simulating a parametrised and normalised kinematic constrains dependent on an insertion variable in a virtual robot.
Results: Two preoperative path planning models were obtained, which provide a teleoperated robot with kinematic constraints to semiautonomously drive a Tuohy needle in the epidural anaesthesia procedure.
Conclusions: A semiautonomous robot can assist in the execution of this PP using the kinematic constraints obtained from the study of the movement of a specialist's hands.
Keywords: epidural anaesthesia procedure; needle path planning; percutaneous procedure; semiautonomous robot.
© 2022 The Authors. The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.