ROBOCATH: A Patient-Mounted Parallel Robot to Position and Orient Surgical Catheters

Abstract

Hosting the cardiac catheters and the necessity for their precise and collision-free navigation in transapical beating-heart interventions require the development of dexterous and reliable robotic platforms. These mechanisms should not only be capable of tracking the desired trajectories with high level of accuracy but also have to have the potential to cope with strict medical constraints such as environment compatibility, patient safety and compactness. In this paper, we propose a robotic platform that takes into account the above mentioned requirements. Benefiting from a state-of-the-art parallel structure, this four degree-of-freedom MRI-compatible patient-mounted and cable-driven manipulator (that we name ROBOCATH) seeks to steer cardiac catheters under beating heart condition, while suitably addressing the deficiencies that currently used manipulators vastly suffer from. In addition to the detailed description of the robot design and its specifications, kinematic model along with some experimental results on the prototype are provided.Copyright © 2012 by ASME