Preliminary Design Concept of a Haptic Interface for Coordinated Control of Guidewires and Catheters

In recent years, the convergence of medical science and engineering technologies has led to significant breakthroughs in healthcare. Vascular interventional surgical robots, representing an important innovation at the medicine-engineering interface, have become a research focus due to their potential to overcome limitations of conventional surgical approaches (e.g., limited precision, operator fatigue, and radiation exposure). In the development of vascular interventional surgical robots, natural human-robot interaction and haptic feedback technology play crucial roles in enhancing safety during the procedures. However, these aspects remain significant technical challenges. This paper presents a preliminary design concept of a novel haptic interface for coordinated control of guidewires and catheters. The main contributions include: 1) A haptic feedback implementation method that enables interventionalists to accurately perceive instrument-tissue interaction forces within vasculature. 2) A clinically-oriented coordination control strategy for guidewire and catheter manipulation, proposed to better accommodate the actual surgical requirements. This study builds upon our previous work by proposing a preliminary design concept for the haptic interface of vascular interventional surgical robots, with the aim of establishing a feasible and effective technical framework. Future experimental validation will be designed and conducted to further verify the proposed approach.