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Design and Verification of Novel Low-Cost MR-Guided Small-Animal Stereotactic System

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Abstract

Stereotactic systems have been used for decades to position surgical instruments in important preclinical and clinical studies. We developed and verified a low-cost magnetic-resonance-guided system for accurate preclinical stereotactic operations on small animals. The system consists of both commercially available and custom components, including in-house software written in MATLAB to register coordinate spaces. The software registers target the image-space coordinates from magnetic resonance imaging to the physical space through a rigid-body transform. The transform uses singular value decomposition to determine rotation and translation matrices that are optimal in a least squares sense. Needle positioning and core biopsy studies were performed to verify the accuracy of the system. The needle positioning study demonstrated a sub-millimeter positioning error of 0.294 ± 0.156 mm while using a 26 s gauge Hamilton needle. Biopsy studies demonstrated >94 % success in accessing sub-millimeter stereotactic targets embedded in agarose gel phantoms. These favorable results confirm that despite its relatively low hardware cost (US$18,730) and easy assembly, the system is able to consistently access stereotactic targets on the spatial scale of a small animal.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant DGE-1311230 (JDP), by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) NS082609 (LSH), by the Mayo Clinic Foundation (LSH), and by the ASU-Mayo Clinic Arizona Seed Grant Program (DHF and KMB).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Jonathan D. Plasencia & David H. Frakes

  2. Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic in Arizona, Scottsdale, AZ, 85259, USA

    Leland S. Hu

  3. BNI-ASU Center for Preclinical Imaging, Phoenix, AZ, 85013, USA

    Gregory H. Turner

  4. Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, AZ, 85013, USA

    Gregory H. Turner

  5. Department of Biology, College of Natural Sciences, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Kevin M. Bennett

  6. School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    David H. Frakes

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  1. Jonathan D. Plasencia
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  2. Leland S. Hu
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Correspondence to Jonathan D. Plasencia.

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Plasencia, J.D., Hu, L.S., Turner, G.H. et al. Design and Verification of Novel Low-Cost MR-Guided Small-Animal Stereotactic System. J. Med. Biol. Eng. 36, 526–535 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-016-0153-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-016-0153-9

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