Paper ID: 2211.02293

Automating Vascular Shunt Insertion with the dVRK Surgical Robot

Karthik Dharmarajan, Will Panitch, Muyan Jiang, Kishore Srinivas, Baiyu Shi, Yahav Avigal, Huang Huang, Thomas Low, Danyal Fer, Ken Goldberg

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.

Submitted: Nov 4, 2022