Development of a Tactile Sensing Robot-Assisted System for Vascular Interventional Surgery

The challenge of vascular interventional surgery is that surgeons require to be exposed to X-ray for a long time, operating guidewires and catheters to complete the treatment. To reduce the burden of the surgeons, it is of great significance to develop a tactile sensing robot-assisted system for vascular interventional surgery. Therefore, a slave manipulator with the function of collaborative operating guidewires and catheters was developed to replace doctors to perform the surgery in the operating room. In addition, a master manipulator based on magnetorheological fluids was located on the master side, and the haptic force feedback of the system was realized by generating the tactile force acting on the doctor's hand. To verify the proposed system, a series of experiments were carried out, the results of experiments in “Vitro” indicated that the proposed system has good performance in collaborative operating and can accurately deliver a guidewire and a catheter to the target position. The maximum tracking error of the axial motion was less than 2 mm, and the maximum tracking error of the radial motion was less than 2 degrees, which is acceptable. And under the guidance of the force feedback, the safety of the system was obviously higher than that of without force feedback, after the experiment was completed by 5 participants, the safety increased by 4.32% on average. So, we can get the results that our system is feasible and effective.