A novel robotic system for flexible ureteroscopy

Interventional robots currently exist for flexible ureteroscopy (fURS). However, force feedback and intra-renal pressure, which are important in fURS, were rarely considered when designing these robots.

We propose a novel robotic system for fURS integrated with partial force feedback function that is the bending knob's torque feedback of the flexible ureteroscope, and intra-renal pressure monitoring. The proposed robotic system adopts commercial haptic device to realize torque feedback. In addition, we further propose a neural network-based method to optimize the operation of above haptic device.

Experimental results show that the slave robot can capture the variation of bending conditions and feedback to the operator, and can also accurately monitor the intra-renal pressure. Besides, the neural network-based method shows its potential in improving the operation.

The results confirm the feasibility of proposed robot's functions. In vivo experiments are needed to further evaluate this system in future work.