A Method for Obtaining Contact Force between Catheter Tip and Vascular Wall in Master-slave Robotic System

In the research of vascular interventional surgery robotic system, the force information acquisition of surgical tools (guidewires and catheters) has a significant affect on the safety of surgery, especially the contact force between the catheter tip and vascular wall. Therefore. In order to obtain this contact force, we noticed the pressure sensitive rubber because of its piezoresistive effect and easy processing into any shape. a force sensor based on the pressure sensitive rubber was developed in this paper. Once a force is applied on the force sensor attached to the catheter tip, the contact force can be approximated by the piezoresistive effect of the pressure sensitive rubber. The feasibility of the developed force sensor was verified by the experiments in “Vitro”. And the results showed that the force sensor was developed in this paper can accurately detect the contact force between the catheter tip and vascular wall at different positions in the vascular model, the extraction of contact force information of catheter tip is of great significance to the safety of surgery, and the application potential of pressure sensitive rubber.