AI-Driven Robotic PCI: A Perception-to-Action Framework for Coronary Guidewire Control

Robotic percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) remains predominantly teleoperated, while the most demanding part of the procedure, guidewire navigation through a moving coronary tree under fluoroscopy, still depends on the continuous human interpretation of vessel anatomy, cardiac phase, guidewire position, and target location. We present a preclinical perception-to-action framework for AI-driven robotic PCI that integrates fluoroscopic perception, dynamic coronary vessel memory, vessel-coordinate state estimation, and robot-executable guidewire command generation on a robotic PCI platform. During contrast angiography, phase-indexed vessel–catheter templates and a dynamic vessel-coordinate coronary map are generated. During guidewire manipulation without contrast injection, live fluoroscopy is segmented into catheter and guidewire structures, cardiac phase is estimated by overlap between the live catheter–guidewire skeleton and stored vessel–catheter templates, the guidewire is assigned to the most likely vessel branch, and the distal tip is projected to a vessel-coordinate target representation for robotic action generation. The segmentation dataset contained 6269/1567/957 vessel images, 3857/964/537 guidewire images, and 4796/1199/667 catheter images for training/validation/test splits, respectively. Test-set Dice scores were 90.7% for vessels, 92.6% for catheters, and 89.0% for guidewires. In 623 real-time fluoroscopy frames from physician-supervised animal experiments, phase selection accuracy was 589/623 (94.6%; 95% CI, 92.5–96.1%) and vessel assignment accuracy was 575/623 (92.3%; 95% CI, 89.9–94.1%). Across 34 scenario-level episodes and their associated command-level decisions, correct-command rates ranged from 83.6% to 95.6% across target navigation and safety scenarios. These results provide preclinical evidence that live fluoroscopic perception can be converted into robot-executable coronary guidewire actions within an integrated AI-robotic PCI workflow. The study was designed to establish early system feasibility rather than to prove clinical superiority, large-scale generalization, or comparative advantages over manual or teleoperated robotic PCI.

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Publication Details

Journal
Bioengineering
Published
2026-07-23
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering13080848
Primary Topic
Soft Robotics and Applications
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

AI-Driven Robotic PCI: A Perception-to-Action Framework for Coronary Guidewire Control

Shoujun Zhou, Xiaofeng Su, Huanming Xu, Fucang Jia et al.
Bioengineering
Soft Robotics and Applications
article

AI-Driven Robotic PCI: A Perception-to-Action Framework for Coronary Guidewire Control

Shoujun Zhou, Xiaofeng Su, Huanming Xu, Fucang Jia, Lei Wang, Jing Yang, Liming Huo, Guangyao Zhai, Li Y, J I N Liu, J B Hou, Zijing Liu, Pengfei Bi, Zhendong Liu, Bo Yu, Jun Ma
article en

Abstract

Robotic percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) remains predominantly teleoperated, while the most demanding part of the procedure, guidewire navigation through a moving coronary tree under fluoroscopy, still depends on the continuous human interpretation of vessel anatomy, cardiac phase, guidewire position, and target location. We present a preclinical perception-to-action framework for AI-driven robotic PCI that integrates fluoroscopic perception, dynamic coronary vessel memory, vessel-coordinate state estimation, and robot-executable guidewire command generation on a robotic PCI platform. During contrast angiography, phase-indexed vessel–catheter templates and a dynamic vessel-coordinate coronary map are generated. During guidewire manipulation without contrast injection, live fluoroscopy is segmented into catheter and guidewire structures, cardiac phase is estimated by overlap between the live catheter–guidewire skeleton and stored vessel–catheter templates, the guidewire is assigned to the most likely vessel branch, and the distal tip is projected to a vessel-coordinate target representation for robotic action generation. The segmentation dataset contained 6269/1567/957 vessel images, 3857/964/537 guidewire images, and 4796/1199/667 catheter images for training/validation/test splits, respectively. Test-set Dice scores were 90.7% for vessels, 92.6% for catheters, and 89.0% for guidewires. In 623 real-time fluoroscopy frames from physician-supervised animal experiments, phase selection accuracy was 589/623 (94.6%; 95% CI, 92.5–96.1%) and vessel assignment accuracy was 575/623 (92.3%; 95% CI, 89.9–94.1%). Across 34 scenario-level episodes and their associated command-level decisions, correct-command rates ranged from 83.6% to 95.6% across target navigation and safety scenarios. These results provide preclinical evidence that live fluoroscopic perception can be converted into robot-executable coronary guidewire actions within an integrated AI-robotic PCI workflow. The study was designed to establish early system feasibility rather than to prove clinical superiority, large-scale generalization, or comparative advantages over manual or teleoperated robotic PCI.

BioengineeringVol. 13(8)
Harbin Medical University (CN), Peking University (CN), Beijing Luhe Hospital Affiliated to Capital Medical University (CN), Peking University People's Hospital (CN), Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University (CN), Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (CN), Anshan Hospital (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Peking University
Openalex Percentile: Top 16%
Soft Robotics and Applications
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