A Decade of Prostate Intervention Robots: Systematic Review

Abstract

Abstract: The image-guided prostate intervention robot can assist surgeons in performing minimally invasive intervention procedures. It has the advantage of overcoming the disadvantages of a traditional surgeon's hand tremor and dependence on the need for an experienced surgeon, improving the intervention precision, and reducing the hazards caused by normal soft tissues due to surgical precision errors compared to traditional intervention procedures. In the design of prostate intervention robots, structural design, materials, actuators, and compatibility issues should be considered. Based on the above considerations, a representative literature of the last decade was selected for review. Patents and articles on image-guided prostate intervention robots published in the last 10 years (2013-2023)were searched in several electronic databases, focusing on keywords (structural design, puncture accuracy, image compatibility, actuator) for screening. We retrieved a total of 26 prostate intervention robots guided by different images, classified them by US, MRI, MRI-US and CT, selected representative robots guided by different image modalities for review and tabulated them for comparison, and finally boldly predicted that the future direction will be prostate robots guided by MRI-US images. Image-guided prostate intervention robots can improve the deficiencies of conventional intervention procedures. In the future how to improve the intervention accuracy will be the primary problem of all intervention robots, through structural design, materials, actuators, and image compatibility issues have been improved.