Concept and Realization of Intelligent Medical Assistance System for Operation of the Active Catheter

Recently, the catheter has been down-sized and has become functional, and it has begun to be used for practical medical operations. Nowadays intravascular neurosurgery using the catheter is carried out for an aneurysm or cerebral thrombosis. However, it is quite difficult to select the direction at a divergence point because brain blood vessels are narrow and complex. For this reason, an active catheter whose tip can be actuated by a microactuator is studied and developed. Even if the active catheter is realized, its control is very difficult. Therefore we investigate an assistance system for the doctor operating the active catheter. In this paper, we propose the concept of an intelligent medical assistance system for operation of the active catheter. To realize this medical assistance system, we built a prototype of a virtual simulator system consisting of an active joystick, which has force feedback capability, and a 3D-computer graphics display. Using this simulator system, we evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed visual and operation assistance methods through extensive experiments. © 1995, The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.