Haptic Interface With Force and Torque Feedback for Robot-Assisted Endovascular Catheterization

Robot-assisted endovascular catheterization is generally performed remotely; interventionists perceive the operation status and control surgical instruments through haptic interfaces. Our main objective is to create a haptic interface that retains interventionists’ prior clinical operating experience, including motion perception, force feedback, torque feedback, tactile sensation, and operating mode. The haptic interface can capture the interventionists’ operation of both catheters and guidewires and generate force and torque to assist the interventionists in performing surgeries on the master side. The tactile sensation and traditional operating mode are retained by adopting real commercial catheters/guidewires as the operating handles and designing a cooperative operation paradigm. A novel sensor-based force generation solution and a torque generation method with a pantograph mechanism were proposed to improve the force and torque feedback accuracy. Laboratory and animal experiments illustrated the good feasibility of the proposed haptic interface. The proposed haptic interface has a good performance and can enable interventionists to utilize their prior accumulated clinical operating experience. This research could provide a reference for the design of haptic interfaces, and the developed haptic interface has the potential for use in robot-assisted endovascular catheterization.