Without human help
The robot climbed into the heart of a live pig and eliminated the leak in it
Evgenia Shcherbina, "The Attic"
Specialists from the USA, France and Taiwan have developed a robotic catheter that can independently get to its target inside the body and perform surgery in a living heart. The catheter is controlled by machine learning algorithms that simulate the ability of crayfish and insects to navigate in space.
Article by Fagogenis et al. Autonomous robotic intracardiac catheter navigation using haptic vision is published in the journal Science Robotics.
One of the trends of modern medical technologies is non–invasive or minimally invasive surgery, that is, with a minimum of incisions. The fewer incisions a patient has after surgery, the faster he recovers. After surgery, the patient experiences less pain, does not risk infection in the wound, and fewer scars will remain on his body.
Specialists from Harvard Medical School, the University of Strasbourg and Taipei Veterans Hospital in Taiwan have developed a robotic catheter that copies the way of movement in space used, for example, by crayfish and cockroaches.
These animals orient themselves in space with the help of whiskers, determining by touch whether there is an object next to them, and then move, lightly touching this object. This method of orientation is suitable for poor visibility or simply in conditions new to the animal. It resembles the behavior of a person who walks in pitch darkness, lightly touching the wall with his fingers in order to orient himself in space in this way.
The machine learning algorithm controlling the robot's navigation forces the catheter to move along the surface without getting closer or moving away. To do this, he was trained to determine where the surface is and where it is not on three types of images – blood, tissue of the wall of the cardiac ventricle and the aortic valve.
After insertion into the heart, the catheter gently touched the wall of the heart, and then followed along it, reaching the right place – the valve itself. As the catheter progressed, the algorithm transformed the tactile information it received using a pressure sensor into visual information (a process called tactile vision). This was necessary so that a specialist could monitor the catheter. In addition, the catheter is equipped with a millimeter-sized camera and an LED so that the doctor can still see something when the catheter is as close to the tissue as possible.
A drawing from an article in Science Robotics.
Such an operation was performed on pigs who had previously been fitted with artificial aortic valves, specially "leaking". To be sure, the scientists compared three operations: performed by an autonomous catheter, performed by an operator doctor who controls the catheter remotely via a joystick, and performed by a doctor manually.
Autonomous navigation was tested 90 times on five animals, and it was successful in 89 cases.
Thus, an autonomous catheter has been compared in efficiency with a human-controlled instrument. At the same time, it worked faster than a catheter operated by a cameraman, but slightly slower than a catheter operated entirely manually.
Thus, scientists have shown that autonomous navigation in heart surgery is possible and its quality is comparable to manual operations. In addition, it excludes preoperative fluorography, according to which the doctor is guided when performing the operation manually – it takes at least half an hour and exposes the specialist and the patient to radiation.
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