An MR Fluidsbased Master Haptic Interface with Adjustable Protection Threshold for Endovascular Catheterization Insufficient force feedback and collision warning of teleoperation surgical tools increase the risk of endovascular catheterization. This paper proposed a master haptic interface with the adjustable threshold that takes advantage of a surgeonxe2x80x99s natural manipulation skills obtained through experience, as well as generates collision warning with haptic cues to ensure safe operation. The experiments for performance evaluation regarding the haptic force assessment and the realtime adjustment of threshold are conducted. Results show that the magnitude of the instantaneous haptic change in the haptic interface is sufficient to elicit the operatoru0027s response, even for novices. Furthermore, for the setting thresholds after adjustment, the operator has a fast reaction to distinguish whether the catheter tip collides with blood vessels or not by collision warning with haptic cues, thus achieving the goal of safe operation.

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.