Simulation and planning of a magnetically actuated microrobot navigating in the arteries.

Abstract

This paper presents a preoperative microrobotic surgical simulation and planning application. The main contribution is to support computer-aided minimally invasive surgery (MIS) procedure using untethered microrobots that have to navigate within the arterial networks. We first propose a fast interactive application (with endovascular tissues) able to simulate the blood flow and microrobot interaction. Second, we also propose a microrobotic surgical planning framework, based on the anisotropic fast marching method (FMM), that provides a feasible pathway robust to biomedical navigation constraints. We demonstrate the framework performance in a case study of the treatment of peripheral arterial diseases.