Diagnosis of one of the most dangerous and threatening diseases in women, breast cancer, creates a crucial risk to the patients if it is not screened, diagnosed and treated early. An MRI-guided breast biopsy is recommended if the lesions are too small to notice or confirm any previous diagnosis. To accurately sample the lesion tissues, prevent high tissue damage and reduce the procedural time, thereby reducing costs, the Sunram 7 is evaluated in free air and the MR environment. It is a 5 DOF, MR-safe robot which can perform MR-guided breast biopsy using a hollow needle-like biopsy gun. Its positioning and targeting error was studied in free air, and lesion mimicking stiff coloured PVC structures inside a breast phantom were targeted to obtain tissue samples using the 0.25T Esaote scanner while identifying the different error sources in the system.
Upon building the pre-requisites and conducting the initial studies concerning the segmentation and transformations, the Sunram 7 was evaluated to be labelled accurate, with a maximum mean positioning error of 3.18 ± 0.8mm in the 3D space (0.3 ± 1.6mm, 1.9 ± 0.8mm and 1.5 ± 0.95mm in x, y and z directions respectively). The Sunram 7 accurately obtained coloured biopsy samples, with a success rate of 70% in the MR environment. Compared with the standard manual breast biopsy process, this robotic system displays the potential to perform MR-guided breast biopsy inside the MR scanner’s bore by reducing time, tissue damage and eliminating movement errors due to in-situ operation.”