Design and evaluation of sensorized robot for minimally vascular interventional surgery

Remote-controlled vascular interventional robots (RVIRs) are being developed to reduce the occupational risk of the intervening physician, such as radiation, chronic neck and back pain, and increase the accuracy and stability of surgery operation. The collision between the catheter/guidewire tip and blood vessels during the surgery practice is important for minimally invasive surgery because the success of the surgery mainly depends on the detection of collisions. In this study, we propose a novel sensing principle and fabricate a sensorized RVIR. The proposed sensorized RVIR can accurately detect force and reconstruct force feedback. The performance of the proposed sensorized RVIR is evaluated through experiments. The experiment results show that it can accurately measure static force and time-varying force. Subtle force changes caused by changes of movement direction in surgeries can also be detected. In addition, the proposed sensorized RVIR has higher operation efficiency than our previous prototype.