Active Suppression Method of Dangerous Behaviors for Robot-Assisted Vascular Interventional Surgery

The procedure of vascular interventional surgery (VIS) is very complicated. It requires doctors to wear the protecting suits and manipulate the flexible instruments (catheters and guidewires) for a long time to complete the treatment, which may fatigue the doctors and lead to misoperation. Besides, the X-ray radiation in the operating room is also bad for doctors’ health. So, to solve the above challenges, a novel robot-assisted system was developed for VIS, which realizes the separation of the doctor and the operating room; a preliminary method was used on the slave side to reduce the excessive collision force when the tip of the catheter travels through the curved blood vessel, and the active enhancing safety method of the robot-assisted system was proposed to reduce the danger caused by doctors’ misoperation (dangerous behaviors) during the surgery. Finally, to verify the proposed methods, a series of experiments
in vitro
were conducted, and experimental results indicated that the method of assisting the deflection of the tip of the catheter has the potential to reduce the excessive collision force, the collision force at the tip of the catheter was reduced by 0.104 N when a misoperation occurred during the operation procedure under the condition of the active enhancing safety method, and the stronger sense of the tactile presence was generated by the master manipulator when the total force of the slave side was greater than 1.0 N. Therefore, based on the above results, we believe that the proposed methods are effective.