Preliminary Method for Reducing Contact Force between Catheter Tip and Vessel Wall in Endovascular Surgery

Abstract

The study of force has always been very important in robot-assisted vascular interventional surgery. In some special environments, the blood vessels are more curved, and it is difficult for the catheter to pass through smoothly, even with the guidance of the guidewire. However, this will cause excessive contact force between the tip of the catheter and the blood vessel wall, affecting the safety of the operation. Therefore, in this paper, a preliminary concept was proposed to reduce the contact force between the tip of the catheter and the blood vessel wall. Besides, a magnetic field generator was integrated in the slave side of the system, and it can generate a magnetic field to assist the deflection of the tip of the catheter in the more curved blood vessel. Finally, the experiment was carried out to evaluate the proposed method, and the results were indicated that the electromagnetic force can deflect the tip of the catheter effectively, the tip of the catheter can pass through the more curved blood vessel with relatively small contact force in the presence of the magnetic field. So, we can draw the conclusion that the concept proposed in this paper is reasonable and effective.