Low Latency Soft Fiberoptic Choledochoscope Robot Control System

Soft fiberoptic choledochoscope is an important tool for the diagnose and surgical treatment of biliary disease. However, the traditional soft fiberoptic choledochoscope is hard to operate, due to the low position accuracy. Based on the conventional soft fiberoptic choledochoscope, an electrical soft fiberoptic choledochoscope robot with a low latency was developed. In order to improve the controllability of the conventional choledochoscope, the wire traction mechanism and the rotation mechanism are used to bend and rotate the scope, so as to control its movement orientation. The dead band compensation model and control algorithm of the wire traction mechanism are developed to improve the accuracy of the orientation control. The human-computer interaction system and complex motion control system are developed based on ARM embedded system and FPGA. Thanks to the high-speed synchronization channel between FPGA and peripheral, the design of low latency whole-procedure surgical mode was established and verified. Combined with a micro image sensor, real-time video back transmission was realized. The performance of the robot prototype was verified by animal experiment in vivo on a pig. The robot has an extremely low operating latency of no more than 0.402 ms, and a high bending positioning accuracy of ±1.43° error margin within 99.7% confidence interval, which guarantees the safety of biliary surgery.