Application Oriented Design and Simulation of an Innovative Parallel Robot for Brachytherapy

Abstract

The paper presents the design and simulation of a new 5-DOF parallel robot named PARA-BRACHYROB used for brachytherapy. Brachytherapy (BT) is an advanced cancer treatment technique, where radioactive seeds are delivered directly in the tumor without damaging the proximal healthy tissues. Due to the tremendous therapeutic potential of brachytherapy, many researches are encouraged to provide solutions for enhanced placement of BT devices inside the patient body, thus further developing brachytherapy robotic systems. Therefore the paper presents an innovative CT-Scan compatible robotic device for this application. The PARA-BRACHYROB system consists of a parallel robot with five degrees of freedom (DOF) for needle positioning and orientation up to the insertion point in the patient body and a 1-DOF mechanism for the needle insertion. The kinematic models of PARA-BRACHYROB are presented and validated through a multi-body simulation including a short description of the numerical and simulation results for the developed model.