Safety protection based on electromagnetic navigation in robot-assisted vascular interventional surgery

Applications of robotic technology in vascular interventions have potential advantages over conventional vascular surgery. Despite its high-precision and dexterous manipulation, absence of intuitively haptic feedback has been proved to increase the risk of other complications. In this paper, we propose a safety protection framework to prevent the blood vessel from penetration by guide wire in robot-assisted vascular interventional surgery. A 3D vascular model serving as the virtual environment is constructed from the CT images. Then, the centerline of the interventional vascular is extracted and the inner region of the blood vessel is graded. During the surgery, an electromagnetic system is employed to track the guide wire in real time, based on six 5DOF magnetic sensors mounted at the leading end. After a registration mapping the patient's coordinate to image coordinate, the motion of guide wire can be tracked and its trend is simulated with a collision between guide wire and vascular wall detected in real time. To evaluate the proposed method, an experiment in a 3D printed vascular phantom is performed, where the experimental results revealed that the safety protection could be significantly improved during the procedure of inserting guide wire along the vascular to the treatment site.