Flexible Facile Tactile Sensor for Smart Vessel Phantoms

Nikola Fischer,Paul Scheikl,Franziska Mathis-Ullrich,Christian Marzi,Anna Kisilenko,Barbara Galindo-Blanco,Martin Wagner,Beat P Müller-Stich

doi:10.1515/cdbme-2021-1019

Nikola Fischer, Paul Scheikl + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1515/cdbme-2021-1019

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Abstract

Abstract Smart medical phantoms for training and evaluation of endovascular procedures ought to measure impact forces on the vessel walls worth protecting to provide feedback to clinicians and articulated soft robots. Recent commercial smart phantoms are expensive, usually not customizable to different applications and lack accessibility for integrated development. This work investigates piezoresistive films as highly integratable flexible sensors to be used in arbitrary soft vessel phantom anatomies over large surfaces and curved shapes providing quantitative measurement in the force range up to 1 N with 0.1 N resolution. First results show promising performance at the point of calibration and in a 5 mm range around it, with absolute measuring error of 28 mN and a standard deviation of ±10 mN and response times <500 ms. Future work shall address the optimization of response time and sensor shapes as well as the evaluation with experienced clinicians.

Highlights

The clinical relevance of endovascular interventions steadily increases as vascular diseases continue to be one major contributor to death in developed countries [1]
The Endovascular Evaluator EVE (BR Biomedical (P) Ltd., India) utilizes silicone with artery-like elasticity and friction coefficients to mimic the haptic experience of a real procedure in the operation room. Those systems are often expensive and pose a financial hurdle for researchers and developers [4], [5]. They seldom provide the physical accessibility for robotic platforms or an API (Application Programming Interface) that exposes sensor data for integrated development
That the scientific community would benefit from an affordable and facile contact force sensor for hard and soft phantoms that serve as testbeds for the development of novel articulated soft robots and to estimate applied forces during surgical training within those phantoms

Summary

Introduction

The clinical relevance of endovascular interventions steadily increases as vascular diseases continue to be one major contributor to death in developed countries [1]. Commercial smart vessel phantoms, especially virtual reality (VR) simulator systems, demonstrate sophisticated features, such as CathLab VR (CAE Healthcare, Canada), Angio Mentor (Simbionix USA Corp, USA), VIST (Mentics AB, Sweden), and the CATHiS (CATHI GmbH, Germany) These surgical trainers are able to measure collision and frictional forces during the intervention with real-time feedback for the trainee [4]. The Endovascular Evaluator EVE (BR Biomedical (P) Ltd., India) utilizes silicone with artery-like elasticity and friction coefficients to mimic the haptic experience of a real procedure in the operation room Those systems are often expensive and pose a financial hurdle for researchers and developers [4], [5]. There, it can provide real-time data of the contact forces applied to the inner walls to provide an immediate user feedback and thereby an ideal testing environment for robotic systems or during training

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