A Beating‐Heart Procedure with Soft Robotic Guidance

Abstract

Minimally invasive procedures in interventional cardiology are often carried out with tools that lack distal control and visualization methods that introduce noise and uncertainty. This work addresses these complications in the context of cardiac resynchronization therapy, used to treat certain types of heart failure. We introduce a soft robot that actively guides existing interventional tools inside the beating heart. The robot provides controllable distal dexterity through a soft manipulator, as well as passive stability through a stent‐like, expandable stabilization mechanism. Using this platform, existing tools that are normally passive can instead be guided toward a target with high spatial resolution and stability. The operating clinician can thus probe the heart's internal anatomy more methodically than with conventional equipment alone, leading to reduced procedural times. Indeed, results from ex vivo and in vivo studies show reduced overall procedure times, reduced radiation exposure from X‐ray fluoroscopy, and reduced adverse impacts from anatomical probing. The five animal studies further demonstrate that anatomical probing and target localization is the most time‐consuming aspect of cardiac resynchronization therapy and that robotically enhanced dexterity mitigates this primary difficulty.