A Novel Wearable Master Manipulator for the Remote Vascular Interventional Surgery

Vascular interventional surgery (VIS) mainly relies on the surgeon’s clinical experience and the image assistance of digital subtraction angiography (DSA). However, DSA will damage the surgeon’s health. A master-slave vascular interventional surgical robotic system averts the threat of the X-ray, whereas most master manipulators of the system still have some problems, such as the different operating modes compared to the convention and the large inertia of the device itself. Therefore, a wearable device with precise measurement function, SurGlove, is developed in this study. The surgeon can wear SurGolve as the common medical glove and handle the catheter and guidewire directly. The film pressure sensor on the glove can judge the grasping signal and enable the optical tracking system to measure the markers on the device. The spatial rotation angle and displacement distance of the SurGolve are calculated in real-time. By wearing SurGlove, the surgeon can manipulate the guidewire and the catheter cooperatively. Furthermore, the evaluation experiments showed that the proposed device had a mean absolute error of 1.88° and a maximum error of less than 3° in rotation angle measurement. The maximum displacement error was less than 5 mm and the mean absolute error was 1.53 mm. This study preliminarily verified the feasibility of the proposed wearable SurGlove for the VIS robotic system.