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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

A tethered epicardial crawling robot known as HeartLander has been developed for minimally-invasive surgery on the beating heart. The crawler has been tested in vivo many times in a porcine model, a model which provides generally authentic conditions in many ways; however, the pigs tested generally have little epicardial fat, whereas the epicardial fat in human patients will be considerable. As a result, it is necessary to determine the effect of such fat on the performance of the crawler. In one experiment, using fresh ovine hearts ex vivo, clogging of the suction chambers of the crawler during sliding over tissue with active suction was investigated for a variety of thicknesses of epicardial fat. In a second experiment, the maximum traction force during each step was measured when sliding with active suction repeatedly over the same location for a variety of fat thicknesses. The clogging experiment showed accumulation of fat in the suction chamber, with the amount dependent on the state of the epicardial membrane, but the suction line did not clog. The traction experiment showed that traction was maintained in all cases except when the epicardial membrane was excised completely.

Keywords

Medical robotics, minimally invasive surgery, cardiac surgery, instrumentation

Notes

Sponsor: NIH

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Medical Robotics Technology Center

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Surgical Mechatronics Laboratory

Associated Project(s): HeartLander

Text Reference

Nicholas Patronik, Marco A. Zenati, and Cameron Riviere, "A study ex vivo of the effect of epicardial fat on the HeartLander robotic crawler," 5th European IFMBE Conference, IFMBE Proceedings 37, September, 2011, pp. 227-230.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Patronik_2011_6948,
   author = "Nicholas Patronik and Marco A Zenati and Cameron Riviere",
   editor = "Á. Jobbágy",
   title = "A study ex vivo of the effect of epicardial fat on the HeartLander robotic crawler",
   booktitle = "5th European IFMBE Conference, IFMBE Proceedings 37",
   pages = "227-230",
   month = "September",
   year = "2011",
}

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