The Critical Technologies of Vascular Interventional Robotic Catheterization: A Review

Vascular interventional surgery (VIS) robots are capable of performing various operations such as drug delivery, coil filling, balloon stent expansion, percutaneous catheter ablation, and thrombectomy. Some reviews of VIS robots have focused on slave robots and master controllers. However, to the best of authors’ knowledge, there is no review article on the comprehensive description of all technologies of the VIS robots. Therefore, this article comprehensively analyzes the key technologies of the VIS robot. First, according to the type of VIS, the progress of the VIS robots and some typical applications are summarized. Second, the research status and existing problems of four key technologies related to the VIS robots are discussed: surgical instrument delivery system, force perception and haptic feedback technology, surgical navigation with multimodal image fusion, and virtual surgical systems. Finally, we analyze the obstacles to VIS robot development and outline the future directions of active research areas.