CathSim: An Open-source Simulator for Endovascular Intervention

TL;DR

CathSim is an open-source, high-fidelity simulation platform designed to accelerate the development and validation of autonomous endovascular robots, incorporating real-time force sensing and validated with reinforcement learning tasks.

Contribution

This work introduces CathSim, the first open-source simulator for autonomous endovascular intervention, enabling safe, collaborative, and efficient development of robotic catheterization algorithms.

Findings

CathSim accurately mimics real-world endovascular robot behavior.

The simulator supports reinforcement learning for autonomous navigation.

Open-source availability promotes collaborative research.

Abstract

Autonomous robots in endovascular operations have the potential to navigate circulatory systems safely and reliably while decreasing the susceptibility to human errors. However, there are numerous challenges involved with the process of training such robots, such as long training duration and safety issues arising from the interaction between the catheter and the aorta. Recently, endovascular simulators have been employed for medical training but generally do not conform to autonomous catheterization. Furthermore, most current simulators are closed-source, which hinders the collaborative development of safe and reliable autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce CathSim, an open-source simulation environment that accelerates the development of machine learning algorithms for autonomous endovascular navigation. We first simulate the high-fidelity catheter and aorta with a state-of-the-art endovascular robot. We then provide the capability of real-time force sensing between the catheter and the aorta in simulation. Furthermore, we validate our simulator by conducting two different catheterization tasks using two popular reinforcement learning algorithms. The experimental results show that our open-source simulator can mimic the behaviour of real-world endovascular robots and facilitate the development of different autonomous catheterization tasks. Our simulator is publicly available at https://github.com/robotvisionlabs/cathsim.