Path planning in the presence of soft tissue deformation

Path planning for needle insertion into soft tissues has received considerable attention in the recent years. This paper focuses on path planning in the presence of soft tissue deformation based on bio-heat transfer. In order to perform path planning based on soft tissue deformation, modelling of temperature distribution is conducted by establishing a potential field (biological temperature field) method in the presence of soft tissue deformation to generate the optimal path to the target. A 3D governing equation is discretised based on finite element formulations to solve the temperature distribution. The finite element modelling applies the steady-state heat transfer with variable thermal conductivity. The results demonstrate the proposed method can effectively generate the optimal path to the target.