Literature review on needle guidance in soft and preliminary work on smart needling

Precise needle placement is important for a number of percutaneous interventions. However insertions into soft tissues can be difficult to learn and to perform, due to tissue deformation, needle deflection and limited visual feedback. Complications associated with poor placement have been studied. Yet to date, little quantitative information is known about the interaction between needles and soft tissues during penetration, and few effective physically based needle guidance systems exist for such procedures. In this paper, some important works dealing with needle guidance in soft tissue were first reviewed. Then a "smart needling" system was proposed and some preliminary work was described.