Robotic Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Assistant

The Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive technique to stimulate the brain, with main applications in depression treatment and pre-operative planning (via functional motor mapping and speech mapping). On average, a TMS treatment session lasts for 30 minutes and coil handling/positioning might become a strenuous task for the operator. A robotic arm could be used to replace the human operator during the coil positioning tasks allowing the doctor to focus on the data analysis phase. In this thesis, a navigated TMS Robotic Assistant is designed, implemented and integrated with a commercial TMS system to automate the TMS sessions. Two different navigation approaches are investigated: i) with fixed head position, ii) with head movement compensation. To assess the performances of the implemented Robotic Assistant, several experimental sessions are carried out; the results satisfy the expectations, with an accuracy error of 3.5 mm for stimulation targets, which decreases below 2 mm with repeated stimulus. Most of the functional requirements are fulfilled, however further investigations are needed to improve the proposed methods and implement new functionalities to obtain an enhanced version of nTMS Robotic Assistant.