Development of a cardiac catheter remote control robot platform for radiofrequency ablation intervention

Radiofrequency ablation through cardiac catheterization is one of minimally invasive intervention procedures used in drug resistant arrhythmia treatment. To facilitate more accurate and precise catheter navigation, systems for robotic cardiac catheter navigation have been developed and commercialized. The authors have been developing a novel robotic catheter navigation system. The system is a network-based master-slave configuration 3-DOF (Degree-Of-Freedom) robotic manipulator for operation with conventional cardiac ablation catheter. The catheter manipulation motion is composed of the translation (forward/backward) and the roll movements of the catheter and knob rotation for the catheter tip articulation. The master manipulator comprises an operator handle compartment for the knob and the roll movement input, and a base platform for the translation movement input. The slave manipulator implements a robotic catheter platform in which conventional cardiac catheter is mounted and the 3-DOF motions of the catheter are controlled. The system software that runs on a realtime OS based PC, implements the master-slave motion synchronization control in the robot system. The master-slave motion synchronization performance tested with step, sinusoidal and arbitrarily varying motion commands showed satisfactory results with acceptable level of steady state error. The developed system will be further improved through evaluation of safety and performance in in vitro and in vivo tests.