Collaborative Multirobot Navigation‐Assisted Magnetic Catheter Guidance and Shape Perception with Vascular Ultrasound and Electromagnetic Tracking

Intraoperative shape perception of soft surgical instruments during cardiovascular surgery can enrich the surgeon's navigation information. Herein, a novel collaborative multirobot navigation system‐assisted magnetic catheter guidance and shape perception method using the information fusion of robotic vascular ultrasound imaging and electromagnetic tracking (EMT) to reconstruct the catheter's shape and vasculature in 3D are proposed. A collaborative multirobot navigation system with triple manipulators is reported to guide the magnetic catheter with kinematic modeling, whose centerline shape is localized by a six‐degree‐of‐freedom flexible electromagnetic guidewire embedded as the moving backbone of the magnetic catheter, which is fit by a Bézier curve‐based method. The vasculature is intraoperatively scanned by robotic ultrasound imaging, and the vascular contours are segmented by the Hough transform algorithm, which is fused with EMT‐based catheter shape perception to realize spatial reconstruction. In vitro experimental results indicate a shape reconstruction error of 1.12 ± 0.26 mm and a vasculature reconstruction error of 1.65 ± 1.29 mm in four regions, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the potential of the nonionizing approach for robotic endovascular intervention.