Electromagnetic actuation methods for intravascular locomotive microrobot.

Heart diseases such as angina pectoris and myocardial infarction have been becoming the leading causes of death all over the world in recent years. The pharmacotherapy and the surgical operations have been executed for treating heart problems. The percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with catheter is frequently used for the treatment of coronary artery diseases, but the treatment of chronic total occlusion (CTO) is very difficult and challenging operation, since there is no efficient alternative therapy until now. For this reason, the microrobot to improve the intravascular treatment is one of the growing research areas. In this paper, various electromagnetic actuation (EMA) systems to supply driving power for the microrobot were proposed. The performance of the locomotion of microrobot in the 2D and 3D space were validated with in-vitro experiments and also the in-vivo tests were performed for demonstrating the movement of microrobot in the living rabbit.