Haptic guidance based only on cardiac X-ray images for robot assisted coronary intervention

Abstract

Tele-operated robot assisted surgery is of huge interest as it enhances the surgeon’s maneuverability, particularly during Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), such as coronary intervention, where a surgeon loses direct sight of organs and eye-hand coordination. An efficient and effective haptic guidance method in a tele-robotic surgical system can be utilized to lessen the surgeon’s effort, and hence decrease task completion time and/or to reduce errors in navigating the guidewire towards a target location inside a patient’s heart. Previous guidewire navigation procedures usually require time consuming preoperative procedures and/or require an expensive and hard-to-realize sensorized guidewire/catheter [1]. In order to provide efficient and effective haptic guidance in robot-assisted coronary intervention, this paper proposes a haptic guidance system that uses only two X-ray images, which are currently available from C-arm X-ray machines.