A Magnetically Steerable and Automatically Propulsion Guidewire Robot System for Vascular Interventional Surgery

Magnetically soft continuum robot with automatic navigation capability has great potential to improve the treatment conventional vascular interventional surgery, which exists many problems such as long procedure time and high radiation for doctors to manipulate the passive guidewire. This paper proposes a novel guidewire robot system with magnetically steering and automatically propulsion ability. Actuated by an external magnetic field, the system is able to greatly increase the autonomy of conventional guidewires through the efficient coordination of steering and propulsion. We model the kinematics of autonomous propulsion and magnetically actuation steering separately. Then, the steering performance of the guidewire robot is validated under different magnetic field magnitudes and directions. Finally, two scenario application experiments are implemented to demonstrate the automatic navigation capability of the proposed guidewire robot in a simulated clinical environment. The proposed guidewire robot system provides an effective solution for advancing the automation of vascular interventional surgery.