3D-printing based Transducer Holder for Robotic Assisted Ultrasound Guided HIFU

The InnoMotion (Synthes Inc., previously by Innomedic GmbH) is a Conformité Européene (CE) marked (in 2005) robotic system for image-guided percutaneous interventions, providing five pneumatically driven degrees of freedom (DoF) and two manually adjusted DoF. It is a fully MR and CT compatible pneumatic driven tele-manipulator for image guided insertion of cannula and probes for biopsy, drainage, drug delivery, and energetic tumor destruction. In order to achieve the robotic assisted ultrasound guided HIFU therapy, a specific holder was designed for the INNOMOTION robotic arm by using SolidWorks (Dassault Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France). The holder provides at least seven degrees of freedom (DoF), which let the InnoMotion robotic arm hold a HIFU transducer and an ultrasound imaging probe at the same time. The HIFU transducer is mounted to the holder, while the ultrasound (US) probe could be adjusted manually to cover the expected ablation area before therapy. The main components of the holder were 3D-printed by using plastic material and were well compatible with the MR system and InnoMotion robotic arm. And the robotic assisted HIFU experiment could be performed based on this designed setup.