A robotic needle guide for prostate brachytherapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Low dose rate prostate brachytherapy involves the permanent implant of radioactive sources into the prostate region using needles. We present a four-degree-of-freedom robot for prostate brachytherapy. The robot can translate a needle guide in the X-Y plane allowing for precise needle insertion along the Z direction. It can also rotate the guide about the X and Y axes, providing thus fine control over the needle insertion point and angle. The robot is light and mountable on a standard brachytherapy stepper. It is non- back-drivable providing a stable needle insertion direction when the power is off. It allows for manual control of each of the motor axes for fine positioning and has a quick-release mechanism for gross translation of the needle guide. We present the robot design and the performance characteristics of the prototype we built. The robot has an interface that allows the guide to be stepped through a complete treatment plan. A radiation oncologist implanted a phantom according to a treatment plan. Only 32 minutes were required for the complete implant that had 26 needles with 136 seeds. This demonstrates that, in spite of its increased flexibility of use, the robotic guide does not add to the procedure time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".