Preliminary evaluation of haptic guidance for pre-positioning a comanipulated needle

In minimally-invasive procedures like biopsy, the physician has to insert a needle into the tissues of a patient to reach a target. Currently, this task is mostly performed manually. This can result in a large nal positioning error of the tip that might lead to misdiagnosis and inadequate treatment. In this paper, we present 5 haptic guides to assist the clinical gesture of needle insertion. Those guides were evaluated through a preliminary user study involving two physicians, both experts in needle manipulation.