Steerable Tape-Spring Needle for Autonomous Sharp Turns Through Tissue

by Jessica Yinin Tape Spring Needleon Posted on

Steerable needles offer a minimally invasive method to deliver treatment to hard-to-reach tissue regions. We introduce a new class of tape-spring steerable needles capable of sharp turns ranging from 15 to 150 degrees with a turn radius as low as 3mm, which minimizes surrounding tissue damage. In this work, we derive and experimentally validate a geometric model for our steerable needle design. We evaluate both manual and robotic steering of the needle along a Dubins path in 7 kPa and 13 kPa tissue phantoms, simulating our target clinical application in healthy and unhealthy liver tissue. We conduct experiments to measure needle robustness to stiffness transitions between non-homogeneous tissues. We demonstrate progress towards clinical use with needle tip tracking via ultrasound imaging, navigation around anatomical obstacles, and integration with a robotic autonomous steering system.

 

Publications

  • [PDF] [DOI] O. Abdoun, D. Tjandra, K. Yin, P. Kurzan, J. Yin, and M. Yim, “Steerable tape-spring needle for autonomous sharp turns through tissue,” in 2025 ieee international conference on robotics and automation (icra), 2025, pp. 10688-10694.
    [Bibtex] 
    @INPROCEEDINGS{11127659,
author={Abdoun, Omar and Tjandra, Davin and Yin, Katie and Kurzan, Pablo and Yin, Jessica and Yim, Mark},
booktitle={2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
title={Steerable Tape-Spring Needle for Autonomous Sharp Turns Through Tissue},
year={2025},
volume={},
number={},
pages={10688-10694},
keywords={Ultrasonic imaging;Tissue damage;Target tracking;Ultrasonic variables measurement;Navigation;Steering systems;Phantoms;Needles;Robustness;Robots},
doi={10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127659},
pdf={https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11127659}
}