Dr. Desai Awarded NIH Grant for $1.27M

Dr. Jaydev P. Desai, Director of the Robotics, Automation, Manipulation, and Sensing (RAMS) Laboratory has recently been awarded an NIH R01 grant in the amount of $1,277,855 for the project titled: “Robotic Haptic Feedback System for Bx/RFA of Breast Tumor under Continuous MRI.” This project is in collaboration with the University Of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Desai is the Principal Investigator on this project.

The goal of this project is to develop a novel teleoperated robotic system with haptic (sense of touch) feedback capability that will provide accurate feedback to the physician performing Breast biopsy (Bx) and/or Radio-frequency ablation (RFA) under continuous Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Some of the primary challenges of this project include: development of a compact robot manipulator, actuation and sensing that is MRI compatible, efficient use of MRI image sequences to guide the Bx needle and/or RFA probe accurately using adaptive control schemes that incorporate soft-tissue properties as the needle/probe traverses the tissue, and an intuitive user-interface which will provide real-time MRI images and Bx needle/RFA probe tracking with respect to the tumor (target) location.

Published September 19, 2008