Steerable Catheters using Micro-fabricated Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

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Catheters are medical devices widely used to access body cavities, ducts, or vessels. Depending on the material and manufacturing method, catheters have cardiovascular, urological, gastrointestinal, neurovascular, and ophthalmic applications. Particularly for vascular interventions, the navigation of a catheter in tandem with a guidewire to the desired location is the most time consuming and delicate part of the process. The process of sliding catheters and guidewires past each other and reshaping the tip of the wire outside the patient's body can take minutes or up to hours, depending on the type of intervention. Any delays in treatment can be very detrimental to patient outcomes, especially where the interventionist aims to perform a thrombectomy (i.e., remove a clot from a blocked vessel in the brain); the time to reach the clot is critical. Medical and engineering researchers have generally taken the same approach to reduce navigation time: make the catheter or guide wire steerable. Approaches include pull wire mechanisms, magnetic controlled tips, and smart materials that actuate to bend the tip. The limitations of these systems fall into two categories: unfavorable scaling or cumbersome implementation. We propose a new microfabrication paradigm to create dielectric elastomers as artificial muscles that can be attached to micro-catheters to enable steering in tortuous and narrow vessels. Fundamentally the project spans disciplines: using manufacturing and materials engineering to create robotic elements to power medical devices for interventional radiology. It is anticipated that the technology will represent an important enhancement to steerable catheters/micro-catheters that are used for cardiovascular, urological, gastrointestinal, neurovascular, and ophthalmic applications. A key question for the market assessment will be to confirm the medical devices/medical procedures that would benefit the most from the subject technology in terms of desired scale and features.