Usability Test of Master Devices for Robotic Vascular Intervention Procedure

Conventional vascular intervention radiology (VIR) procedure presents a few challenges to overcome, which are radiation exposure issue during the procedure under X-ray, physical and mental burdens to the operator in handling catheter and guidewire. We propose a robotic approach to resolve such problems. Specifically, this paper deals with usability test of master devices to control four degrees of freedom (4-DOF) robotic vascular intervention system. The usability of two master devices was measured in terms of task completion time and NASA-TLX index. Both novice and expert group participated in master-slave vascular intervention procedure based on abdominal blood vessel phantom. We found that position to velocity based master device is much effective compared to position to position based master device.