This study aims to develop and evaluate a manually controlled steerable needle that is compatible with and visible on MRI to facilitate full intra-procedural control and accurate navigation in percutaneous interventions. The steerable needle has a working channel that provides a lumen to a cutting stylet or a therapeutic instrument. A steering mechanism based on cable-operated compliant elements is integrated in the working channel. The needle can be steered by adjusting the orientation of the needle tip through manipulation of the handle. The steering mechanism is evaluated by recording needle deflection at constant steering angles. A steering angle of 20.3° results in a deflection of 9.1–13.3 mm in gelatin and 4.6–18.9 mm in porcine liver tissue at an insertion depth of 60 mm. Additionally, the possibility to control the needle path under MRI guidance is evaluated in a gelatin phantom. The needle can be steered to targets at different locations while starting from the same initial position and orientation under MRI guidance with generally available sequences. The steerable needle offers flexibility to the physician in control and choice of the needle path when navigating the needle toward the target position, which allows for optimization of individual treatment and may increase target accuracy.

Background: The mechanical properties of small minimally invasive instruments are limited and thus must be treated as flexible instruments. Proper functional behavior of these instruments can be significantly enhanced when the instrument is equipped with a shape sensor to track the path of the flexible instrument. MRI compatible instruments, and thus the corresponding paths, are long in particular. Therefore, the accuracy of the tip position is stringent. Approach: We have developed and realized a thin Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) based fiber optical shape sensor. The main advantages of this fiber optical sensor are its minimum dimensions, the intrinsic MRI compatibility, and the ability of sensing deformation with submicro-strain accuracy. The shape sensor consists of three fibers, each equipped with multiple FBG's, which are integrated physically by gluing and can be positioned inside an flexible instrument. In this study a critical component analysis and numerical error analysis were performed. To improve performance, a calibration procedure was developed for the shape sensor. Results and Conclusion: With current state of the art interrogators it is possible to measure a local deformation with a triplet of FBG sensor very accurately. At high radii of curvature, the accuracy is dominated by the interrogator, whereas at low radii of curvature, the position of the fibers is leading. The results show that position error of a single segment of the shape sensor (outer diameter of 220 μm, a segment length of 23.5 mm and a minimum bending radius of 30 mm) could be measured with accuracies (3σ) of 100 μm for low radius of curvature upto 8 μm for high radii of curvature.