Al-Ahmad Omar, Ourak Mouloud, Vlekken Johan, Lindner Eric, Vander Poorten Emmanuel
Robot-Assisted Surgery (RAS) group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven University, Leuven, Belgium.
FBGS International NV, Geel, Belgium.
Front Robot AI. 2023 Mar 9;10:1154494. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2023.1154494. eCollection 2023.
Awareness of catheter tip interaction forces is a crucial aspect during cardiac ablation procedures. The most important contact forces are the ones that originate between the catheter tip and the beating cardiac tissue. Clinical studies have shown that effective ablation occurs when contact forces are in the proximity of 0.2 N. Lower contact forces lead to ineffective ablation, while higher contact forces may result in complications such as cardiac perforation. Accurate and high resolution force sensing is therefore indispensable in such critical situations. Accordingly, this work presents the development of a unique and novel catheter tip force sensor utilizing a multi-core fiber with inscribed fiber Bragg gratings. A customizable helical compression spring is designed to serve as the flexural component relaying external forces to the multi-core fiber. The limited number of components, simple construction, and compact nature of the sensor makes it an appealing solution towards clinical translation. An elaborated approach is proposed for the design and dimensioning of the necessary sensor components. The approach also presents a unique method to decouple longitudinal and lateral force measurements. A force sensor prototype and a dedicated calibration setup are developed to experimentally validate the theoretical performance. Results show that the proposed force sensor exhibits 7.4 mN longitudinal resolution, 0.8 mN lateral resolution, 0.72 mN mean longitudinal error, 0.96 mN mean lateral error, a high repeatability, and excellent decoupling between longitudinal and lateral forces.
在心脏消融手术过程中，了解导管尖端相互作用力是一个至关重要的方面。最重要的接触力是导管尖端与跳动的心脏组织之间产生的力。临床研究表明，当接触力接近0.2 N时会发生有效的消融。较低的接触力会导致消融无效，而较高的接触力可能会导致诸如心脏穿孔等并发症。因此，在这种关键情况下，精确且高分辨率的力传感是必不可少的。相应地，这项工作展示了一种独特新颖的导管尖端力传感器的开发，该传感器利用带有写入光纤布拉格光栅的多芯光纤。设计了一种可定制的螺旋压缩弹簧，作为将外力传递到多芯光纤的挠曲部件。该传感器组件数量有限、结构简单且体积紧凑，使其成为临床转化的一个有吸引力的解决方案。针对必要的传感器组件的设计和尺寸确定提出了一种详尽的方法。该方法还提出了一种独特的方法来解耦纵向和横向力测量。开发了一个力传感器原型和一个专用校准装置，以通过实验验证理论性能。结果表明，所提出的力传感器具有7.4 mN的纵向分辨率、0.8 mN的横向分辨率、0.72 mN的平均纵向误差、0.96 mN的平均横向误差、高重复性以及纵向和横向力之间的出色解耦性能。
