Intelligent assistance for intravascular tele-surgery and experiments on virtual simulator

It is important to assist doctors operating intravascular surgical tools such as a catheter that is designed for minimum invasive surgery inside complex and narrow brain blood vessels. We propose a intelligent medical assistance system for operation of the intravascular surgical tool that is teleoperated by the doctor seeing a 2D X-ray image. We built a prototype of a virtual simulator system consisting of a joystick and a 3D-computer graphics display. The joystick is used for the controller of catheter head direction and the force display. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed visual and force assistance methods through extensive experiments.