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  4. Robotic Curvilinear Laser Thermal Therapy Probe for Transforamenal Hippocampotomy

Robotic Curvilinear Laser Thermal Therapy Probe for Transforamenal Hippocampotomy

AUTHORS

Esser Daniel , Peters John , Grillo Abby , Garrow Sarah J. , Ball Tyler , Naftel Robert , Englot Dario J. , Neimat Joseph , Grissom Will , Barth Eric J. , Webster Robert J. . Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, 2022.

ABSTRACT

Epilepsy affects an estimated one out of 150 people, with 30% of patients unresponsive to existing drug- based therapies for seizure management. Hippocampal resection can be a curative procedure for drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy [1], however, current rates of surgical resection are limited by perceived and real risks of undergoing neurosurgery [2]. Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy (LITT) is a less invasive alternative to surgical resection, which heats brain tissue causing thermal necrosis [3]. Existing commercial LITT tools (Medtronic, Monteris) are straight probes which are inserted through the skull. Reaching deep brain targets such as the hippocampus requires traversing significant amounts of potentially eloquent brain tissue [3]. Deploying LITT using curved needles to avoid critical neural structures has been proposed and explored in simulation and computational design [4], [5], but has yet to be demonstrated experimentally. The purpose of this paper is to describe the first experimental prototype of a needle that can deliver LITT along a curved trajectory.

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