Intelligent assistance in operation of active catheter for minimum invasive surgery

It is important to assist doctors in operating the (active) catheter in complex and narrow brain blood vessels aiming at the minimum invasive surgery. We propose the concept of the intelligent medical assistance system for the operation of the active catheter. To realize the system we built a prototype of a basic system consisting of a joy-stick and a 3D computer graphics display. The joystick is used for the command input and the force display. We evaluated the effectiveness of the prototype and the proposed assistance methods through the experiments