A Kirigami-Based Magnetically Steerable Robotic Catheter for Treatment of Peripheral Artery Disease

摘要

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a medical condition in which the patient's leg blood vessels are obstructed or narrowed and is typically treated by a percutaneous endovascular intervention (PEI). In a PEI, a catheter is inserted and steered into the affected blood vessel with the goal of opening the blocked artery and restoring the blood flow. Today's manual PEI procedures suffer from low steerability of catheters, which incur challenges to navigate the catheter through complex vasculatures with bifurcations, causing increased radiation exposure and trauma risks in the tissue. Magnetic actuation is a promising approach for non-contact catheter steering. However, prior designs of magnetically steerable continuum robotic catheters often suffer from limited steering capability, high cost, and the lack of intuitive user interface, making them challenging to be deployed clinically. Aiming at the aforesaid challenges, this paper presents a novel magnetically steerable robotic catheter featuring a kirigami-based fabrication procedure. Using the heat-shrinking property of thermoplastic materials, this design offers a novel and cost-effective fabrication approach for the flexible distal segment of the catheter. Further, to completely control the catheter's degrees of freedom, we developed a contactless magnetic actuation system to steer a ring-shaped magnet adhered to the distal end of the catheter and designed a compact friction drive to facilitate its insertion procedure. The obtained Finite Element simulation and experimental results demonstrate high correlation and clearly validate the efficacy and high performance of the proposed fabrication procedure and magnetically steerable robotic system for the considered PEI.