Surgeons' Operation Skill-Based Control Strategy and Preliminary Evaluation for a Vascular Interventional Surgical Robot

Background Remote vascular intervention surgery that employs surgical robot is an important research field. It is difficult to ensure that the surgical robot realize the surgeons' operation skills precisely. Objective To solve this problem, surgical robot must be able to duplicate the surgeons' changeable operation, and guarantee accuracy of synchronous motion between the surgeon's unpredictable operation and robotic control of surgical tool. Method In this research, the surgeons' operations were disassembled, eight basic actions were obtained. The surgical robot which can reproduce these basic actions is designed. Further, fuzzy control theory was applied to optimize the remote control and to guarantee the control precision of the synchronous operations. Result Using an experiment, the surgical procedures and operations of interventional surgical robot were obtained and evaluated. The robot can duplicate the surgeons' operative skills when the control precision of the guidewire is guaranteed. And the axial displacement error of the surgical robot is limited to less than 2 mm. Conclusion The new type of interventional surgical robot was designed and proved that the surgical robot can duplicate the operation skills of the surgeon. The control error of novel surgical robot reaches the accuracy required by the surgeon.