MechE PhD Dissertation Defense: Jacob Rogatinsky
- Starts: 10:00 am on Friday, January 17, 2025
- Ends: 12:00 pm on Friday, January 17, 2025
ABSTRACT: Minimally-invasive procedures in interventional cardiology are often carried out with tools that lack distal control, and visualization methods that introduce noise and uncertainty. These operations are further compounded by the heart’s constant motion and limited operational workspace. This work introduces a soft robot that actively guides existing interventional tools inside the beating heart. The robot provides controllable distal dexterity through a soft manipulator, as well as passive stability through a stent-like, expandable stabilization mechanism. The soft manipulator is based on the Stacked Balloon Actuator (SBA) architecture, which was previously used in a binary inflate-deflate manner, but introduced herein as a dexterous and fully shape-tunable continuum robot. A layered process for high-yield fabrication was developed for the SBA and carried over to the stabilization mechanism, allowing both of these key components to be fabricated consistently and on the order of minutes to hours. Additionally, modeling strategies for the SBA are introduced and verified with extensive benchtop characterizations, paving the way toward SBA utilization in a variety of applications. The SBA and stabilization mechanism are integrated in a robotic platform with auxiliary components for control and a user interface. Using this integrated robotic system, existing interventional tools that are normally passive can instead be guided toward a target with high spatial resolution and stability. The operating clinician can thus probe the heart’s internal anatomy more methodically than with conven-tional equipment alone, leading to reduced procedural times. Results from multiple ex-vivo and five in-vivo studies show reduced overall procedure times, reduced radia-tion exposure from X-ray fluoroscopy, and reduced adverse impacts from anatomical probing. The robot is also compatible with tools up to 3 mm in diameter, giving it the potential to generalize to a variety clinical workflows. The hardware and meth-ods introduced here could enable a diverse array of intracardiac interventions that are safer for the patient and more efficient for the clinician.
COMMITTEE: ADVISOR Professor Tommaso Ranzani, ME/MSE/BME; CHAIR Professor Scott Bunch, ME/MSE; Professor Sheila Russo, ME/MSE; Professor Roberto Tron, ME/SE; Professor Douglas Holmes, ME/MSE
- Location:
- CDS 1101, 665 Commonwealth Ave
- Hosting Professor
- Ranzani