Robotic Ultrasound for Catheter Navigation in Endovascular Procedures Endovascular procedures require real time visual feedback on the location of inserted catheters. This is currently achieved using Xray fluoroscopy, which causes exposure to radiation. This study describes an alternative method using a robotic ultrasound system for catheter tracking and navigation in endovascular interventions, focusing on endovascular aneurysm repair. This approach relies on the registration of preoperative images to provide both a tracking trajectory and visual feedback of the realtime catheter position. The procedure was validated on healthy volunteers and on a phantom that included a realistic vessel structure, showing an average tracking error of the moving catheter tip of 1.78xc2xb11.02 mm.

Haptic Guidance for RobotAssisted Endovascular Procedures: Implementation and Evaluation on Surgical Simulator Vascular diseases are the most common precursors to ischemic heart disease and stroke, which are two of the leading causes of death worldwide. Endovascular intervention is a minimally invasive surgical approach to treat such diseases. Compared to open surgery, it has the advantages of faster recovery, reduced need for general anesthesia, reduced blood loss and significantly lower mortality. Endovascular procedures require high surgical skills to minimize contacts between the manipulated instruments (catheters and guidewires) and the vessel wall, which represent one of the major risks for the patient. Robotic assistance can potentially improve the precision and stability of instruments manipulation. One key limitation of current commercial robotic platforms is the lack of haptic feedback, preventing their acceptance and limiting the clinical usability. This paper proposes to bring the benefit of haptic feedback to robotassisted endovascular intervention. Here we hypothesize that the introduction of 3D haptic guidance during robotassisted endovascular procedure can further improve the surgical performance and safety while overcoming the limitations of currently available technology. The proposed 3D haptic guidance allows the surgeon to sense the vasculature while controlling a catheter through a robotic haptic manipulator. Validation of the system is performed through enduser experiments with vascular surgeons on a bespoke surgical simulator. The obtained results demonstrate that 3D haptic guidance has the potential of improving effectiveness, precision, and safety of endovascular intervention. Furthermore, vascular surgeons found the proposed technology safe and overall easy to use, indicating its potential on real surgical procedures.