Design and Experiments of a Catheter Side Wall Tactile Sensor for Minimum Invasive Surgery

MIS (minimum invasive surgery) helps a lot for surgeons and patients and reduces the operating time and patients' pains. But lack of tactile sense makes surgeons hard to do the operation. They must be very cautious to insert the catheter. With the aim to get the lost tactile information, scientists and engineers have developed several mechanisms and tactile sensors to help surgeons to do the operation. In this paper, a novel tactile sensor based on PVDF has been developed to measure the pressure on side wall of the catheter which was not paid enough attention in previous. With this sensor, surgeons can "feel" the contact force between the side wall of the catheter and blood vessel. Thus, medical accidents can be avoided greatly by utilizing this sensor in the surgery. The principle, interface circuit and calibrating experiment of the developed sensor was presented in this paper. The result of experiments shows that our tactile sensor has a very sensitive response and suits for minimum invasive surgery.