Design and performance evaluation of a novel master manipulator for the robot-assist catheter system

Abstract

According to the world health organization survey, the number of patients died of disease of heart head blood-vessel per year up to 15 million, a serious threat to human health. Vascular Interventional Surgery (VIS) has been an effective method for treatment of vascular diseases. However, the surgeons are exposed to X-ray threatening the surgeons' health due to the depositing which lasts long. It is imperative to protect the surgeons from X-ray during VIS. In this paper, a novel master manipulation system for VIS has been developed. With this system, the surgeon operates a real catheter on the master side, which can make full use of the natural catheter manipulation experience and skills obtained in conventional catheter operation. In order to improve the safety of the vascular surgery, a damper is used to realize the force feedback based on the electro-magnetic induction. The damper contains a bobbin and permanent magnets. It could feedback the force to surgeon's hand through the operating catheter from the master controller, which seems that the surgeon operates the catheter beside the patient. The evaluation experiment for the proposed master manipulator was done. The experimental results show that the stability is high and the error is in the permitted range, so the novel operating system is suitable for the robot-assist catheter system.