Haptic feedback in endovascular tele-surgery simulation through vasculature phantom morphology changes

The introduction of robotics technology within endovascular surgical procedures has realised accurate catheter navigation and reduced surgeon irradiation. Insufficient force information from the catheter remains a limitation for significant improvement in the performance of these procedures. While recent developments of catheter tip-force measurement sensors have witnessed a notable outcome, packaging complexities and sensor size constraints limit their application. This work presents an approach to catheter tip-force measurement during endovascular surgery simulation. Image processing and photoelasticity are utilized to measure arterial stress and morphological deformation in a carotid artery segment model. Deformation is measured in real-time and conveyed to the user as haptic feedback during tele-operation of a robotic catheter insertion system. A preliminary single user study was completed to realise the potential of force feedback as it is correlated to the level of deformation and stress in the artery model. The results of this haptic feedback are compared with experimental results of the same operator manually inserting the catheter, and also using a computer graphical-user-interface to control the catheter insertion system.