Steerable Catheters using Micro-fabricated Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

导管是广泛用于进入体腔、导管或血管的医疗器械。根据材料和制造方法，导管具有心血管、泌尿、胃肠道、神经血管和眼科应用。特别是对于血管介入，将导管与导丝串联导航到所需位置是该过程中最耗时且最精细的部分。将导管和导丝滑动通过彼此并在患者体外重塑导丝尖端的过程可能需要几分钟或长达几小时，这取决于干预的类型。治疗中的任何延迟可能对患者结果非常不利，特别是在介入医生旨在进行血栓切除术的情况下（即，从大脑中阻塞的血管中取出凝块）;到达凝块的时间至关重要。医学和工程研究人员通常采取相同的方法来减少导航时间：使导管或导丝可操纵。方法包括拉线机构、磁控尖端和致动以使尖端弯曲的智能材料。这些系统的局限性分为两类：不利的扩展或繁琐的实施。我们提出了一种新的微制造范例，以创建介电弹性体作为人造肌肉，可以连接到微导管，使转向曲折和狭窄的血管。从根本上说，该项目跨越学科：使用制造和材料工程来创建机器人元件，为介入放射学的医疗设备提供动力。预计该技术将代表用于心血管、泌尿、胃肠道、神经血管和眼科应用的可控导管/微导管的重要增强。市场评估的一个关键问题是确认在预期规模和功能方面从申报技术中获益最大的医疗器械/医疗程序。

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.