SEEING CANCER WITH ROBOTICS

In oncological interventions, surgeons will resect tumors and biopsy physical samples of the surrounding tissue for subsequent histological analysis, in order to confirm the presence or absence of cancerous tissue. This approach has a number of drawbacks; biopsies are discretely sampled, analysis is made post-hoc on dead tissue and crucially, histological analysis is time consuming and cannot be completed until after the surgery has taken place. Emerging probe -based microscopy technologies, are enabling real -time, in vivo imaging of tissue during surgical interventions. However, these optical fiber -based probes have a small field of view and are difficult to stabilize. To address this challenge, I developed a mechatronic instrument that could precisely servo a microscopic imaging probe so that the microscopy images can be stitched together to form a large scale mosaic of the resected tissue. This technique will allow surgeons to delineate tumor margins during an intervention so as to conserve healthy tissue when resecting and reduce the number of repeat surgeries.

The hand-held mechatronic microscopy scanner can perform lateral spiraling trajectories of the microscopy probe in order to generate a macro-scale mosaic of the tissue. In order to compensate displacement of the soft tissue, our team developed control algorithms that use the real-time microscopy images to adapt the motion trajectory of the probe tip. This improved control allows the microscopic images to be effectively stitched together in to a seamless image that will highlight the boundaries between cancerous lesions and healthy tissue.