Towards Rebuild The Interventionist's Intra-Operative Natural Behavior: A Fully Sensorized Endovascular Robotic System Design

Vascular intervention is a challenging but effective therapy in the medical field. With the increasing research on computer-assisted intervention area, many interventional robotic systems in master-slave mode have been designed to isolate the interventionists from the operating room to reduce the radiation damage. However, to design the acquisition chain of the interventional sensing data set, include haptic and positioning information, in real-time is still a problematic domain. In this paper, we proposed a fully sensorized interventional robot where a novel haptic sensing module is designed. Meanwhile, a sophisticated guidewire tip positioning framework has been carefully implemented. Besides, we have designed a multi-loop system in order to perform a closed-loop control architecture. For the performance evaluation, we have designed three experiments in these parts with two different vascular models and shows the result of them to prove the feasibility of the fully automatic vascular intervention. As a result, the vascular path searching algorithm with the positioning system can distinguish different path. Also, the force/torque sensing unit can receive the feedback from the guidewire tip while the guidewire goes forward or back. The successful phantom experiments indicate the feasibility and effectiveness of the path search algorithm, the positioning system, and the force/torque sensing unit.