Development of a Master-Slave Robotic System for MRI-Guided Intracardiac Interventions

Restricted space inside the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner bore prevents surgeons to directly interact with the patient during MRI-guided procedures. This motivates the development of a robotic system that can act as an interface during those interventions. In this paper, we present a master-slave robotic system as a solution to the aforedescribed issue. The proposed system consists of a commercial PHANTOM device (product of The Sensable Technologies) as the master robot and an MRI-compatible patient-mounted parallel platform (that we name ROBOCATH) designed to serve as the slave mechanism inside the scanner bore. We present in this paper the design principles for the platform, as well as the PID control design for the system. We use our experimental setup to evaluate the performance of the system by examining the effectiveness of the slave platform in tracking the reference trajectories generated by the master robot.