Teleoperated robotic surgical system for percutaneous coronary intervention

Heart disease has been the leading cause of death worldwide for decades. Today, Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) has become the gold standard for treating heart disease due to its minimally invasive nature, effectively reducing the time for both surgery and recovery. During a PCI procedure, the surgeon injects a contrast agent into the coronary arteries and uses live X-ray images to obtain information on blockages. However, prolonged radiation exposure could cause dose accumulation and harm to surgeons. Recently, major technological advancements in robotic surgery have made minimally invasive surgery easier. In contrast, only a few robotic surgical systems have been developed for PCI with semi-automation. In this study, the framework of a teleoperated PCI robotic surgical system, mimicking the common manipulation techniques by surgeons such as push, pull, and rotation, was developed. The framework consists of three major components: a surgeon side, a patient side, and an automatic delivery system. The automatic delivery system supplies the guidewire and catheter into the patient side. The surgeon remotely controls the patient-side robot from the surgeon side to perform a teleoperated PCI procedure, eliminating the need for medical personnel in the surgery room and addressing prolonged radiation exposure issues. To ensure the response accuracy between the surgeon side and patient side, PI controllers are incorporated into the control architecture. These PI controllers, designed using Particle Swarm Optimization, demonstrate high performance and meet the desired goals. The system performance of this PCI robotic surgical system has been validated in a silicone vascular model.