Automating Vascular Shunt Insertion with the dVRK Surgical Robot

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated pipeline for vascular shunt insertion using the da Vinci Research Kit, combining visual modeling, planning, and robotic manipulation to improve success rates in simulated vessel models.

Contribution

The authors develop and demonstrate a novel automated system for vascular shunt insertion with a learned visual model and robotic control, advancing surgical automation capabilities.

Findings

High success rate in vessel phantom experiments

Effective handling of tight tolerances and vessel orientations up to 30°

Demonstrated feasibility of AVSI in simulated surgical scenarios

Abstract

Vascular shunt insertion is a fundamental surgical procedure used to temporarily restore blood flow to tissues. It is often performed in the field after major trauma. We formulate a problem of automated vascular shunt insertion and propose a pipeline to perform Automated Vascular Shunt Insertion (AVSI) using a da Vinci Research Kit. The pipeline uses a learned visual model to estimate the locus of the vessel rim, plans a grasp on the rim, and moves to grasp at that point. The first robot gripper then pulls the rim to stretch open the vessel with a dilation motion. The second robot gripper then proceeds to insert a shunt into the vessel phantom (a model of the blood vessel) with a chamfer tilt followed by a screw motion. Results suggest that AVSI achieves a high success rate even with tight tolerances and varying vessel orientations up to 30{\deg}. Supplementary material, dataset, videos, and visualizations can be found at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/autolab-avsi.