New robotic system may boost Parkinson's treatment

Hong Kong, June 16: Scientists have developed a robotic system that can perform brain surgeries within a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to facilitate the treatment of Parkinson's disease and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a kind of stereotactic neurosurgery that can treat neuropsychiatric disorders such as Parkinson's disease.

It involves the delivery of electrical signals through implanted electrodes to the deep brain targets, which helps to restore normal nerve cell activity.

The researchers from the University of Hong Kong designed a neurosurgical robotic system capable of performing bilateral stereotactic neurosurgery inside an MRI scanner, Xinhua news agency reported.

The compact robot design can be accommodated inside a standard MRI head coil for imaging and intervention.

DBS surgery is tremendously demanding accuracy by targeting only the tiny nucleus structures and not damaging the surrounding critical tissue.

To ensure accuracy, the patient needs to have an MRI scanning before the surgery and has to be awake under local anesthesia during the course of the surgery.

The robotic system also has advanced 3D tracking markers, which enable fast localisation of robot instruments in MRI in real time.

This facilitates less invasive stereotactic procedures on the patient under general anesthesia as surgeons could accurately control and evaluate the stereotactic manipulation bilaterally to the left and right brain targets in real time, the researchers said.