Magnetic Soft Continuum Robots for Telerobotic Stroke Intervention

Abstract

Robotic technologies have been adopted in various subspecialties of both open and minimally invasive surgery, offering benefits such as enhanced surgical precision and accuracy with reduced effort and fatigue of the surgeon. However, robotic applications to endovascular neurosurgery for treating stroke or brain aneurysms have remained largely unexplored. The brain’s blood vessels are considerably challenging to navigate with a manually controlled passive guidewire, and improper or redundant guidewire manipulation can lead to devastating complications. Existing vascular robotic systems are designed to manipulate conventional guidewires with limited steering capabilities and remain unsuited for neurovascular intervention. In this thesis, we propose a telerobotic neurointerventional platform based on a magnetically controlled soft continuum robot. Composed of soft polymers containing tiny magnetic particles as distributed actuation sources, our magnetic soft continuum robot is thin and flexible enough to navigate the narrow and winding pathways of the brain’s blood vessels. Our magnetic manipulation system consists of a robot arm with an actuating magnet and motorized linear drives to remotely steer and advance the continuum robot under the real-time teleoperation of the system. We evaluate our system’s performance both in vitro with realistic anatomical models and in vivo with a porcine model and demonstrate telerobotically assisted therapeutic procedures for endovascular treatments of stroke and aneurysms. When compared with manually controlled passive guidewires, our telerobotic neurointerventional system based on magnetic manipulation helps to achieve safer and quicker access to hard-to-reach areas in the complex cerebral vasculature. Our system also allows an operator to work remotely from the radiation source to minimize x-ray exposure during the intervention. Furthermore, it may open the possibility of remote procedural services for telerobotic stroke intervention to address the logistical challenge in current stroke systems of care.