Performance evaluation of the novel grasper for a robotic catheter navigation system

This paper proposed a novel grasper for a novel master-slave robotic catheter navigation system in Vascular Interventional Surgery (VIS). The developed novel grasper can imitate the catheter grasping motion of the surgeon during VIS. The grasper is a key factor to drive the catheter into the vessel accurately. It adopts a common structure like the pliers, which can guarantee that the catheter can be clamped on the same axes with other via hole. The clamping force can be adjusted by the screw through changing the entered length of the screw to change the compression length of the spring. The clamping system consists of two graspers both master side and slave side respectively. The graspers clamp the catheter just like the surgeon's hand and the clamping method of the grasper imitates the surgeon's operation. The performance evaluation experiments of the novel grasper were done. The experimental results indicated that the grasper was effective to clamp catheter tightly to increase accuracy of surgery, which can satisfy the design demand.