Numerical comparison of catheter insertion trajectory within blood vessel model using image processing

Vascular disease is a major cause of death, therefore it is desirable to develop robots and simulation tools for catheter trajectory evaluation. Until now trajectory completion duration, catheter tip location, wall deformation, morphology and stress applied to blood vessel phantom wall were identified as evaluation parameters during endovascular surgery simulation. For that purpose image processing and photoelastic stress analysis were used to measure those parameters from five source trajectories and from them to build a reference trajectory. Then the reference trajectory was used to evaluate five trajectories; were the catheter was driven by different persons or using a catheter insertion robot. The average catheter tip detection success rate of 94.96% and the image processing module speed of 769ms enable to register and evaluate human skills abilities using the proposed reference trajectory construction method. The reference trajectory construction and error calculation could be used to apply feedback control to the catheter insertion robot with those parameters.