Design and development of an endoscopic robotic system and deep reinforcement learning path planning algorithm for fine-needle biopsy of liver lesions.

Raghav Khanna, Nikola Fischer, Zhenting Du, Christos Bergeles

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Article in International journal of computer assisted radiology and surgery, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Raghav KhannaSchool of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, UK. Raghav.Khanna@kcl.ac.uk.ORCID http://orcid.org/0009-0008-7021-5978

Nikola FischerSchool of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, UK.

Zhenting DuSchool of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, UK.

Christos BergelesSchool of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, UK.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of a novel robotic platform for endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle biopsy of liver lesions. The system combines a four degrees-of-freedom (DoF) two-segment tendon-driven continuum robot (TDCR) endoscope with a two DoF superelastic nickel-titanium bevel-tip steerable needle. Needle path planning is achieved using NeedleNav, a soft actor-critic (SAC) deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model that generates collision-free trajectories to deep-seated lesions. This represents one of the first integrated systems combining a TDCR, steerable needle and DRL-based navigation, and the first application of a SAC to liver lesion targeting. Evaluation of the TDCR through tip tracking of circular, diamond-shaped and arc trajectories demonstrated a mean absolute error (MAE) of 13.19 mm. NeedleNav converged to obstacle avoidance trajectories in

Indexed as

Continuum robotEndoscopic ultrasoundPath planningReinforcement learningSoft actor–criticSteerable needle

Identifiers

PMID42684647

DOI10.1016/j.conengprac.2017.04.001

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.