Towards Autonomous Navigation in Endovascular Interventions

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jianu, Tudor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911335722254336
author Jianu, Tudor
author_facet Jianu, Tudor
contents Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of global mortality, with minimally invasive treatment options offered through endovascular interventions. However, the precision and adaptability of current robotic systems for endovascular navigation are limited by heuristic control, low autonomy, and the absence of haptic feedback. This thesis presents an integrated AI-driven framework for autonomous guidewire navigation in complex vascular environments, addressing key challenges in data availability, simulation fidelity, and navigational accuracy. A high-fidelity, real-time simulation platform, CathSim, is introduced for reinforcement learning based catheter navigation, featuring anatomically accurate vascular models and contact dynamics. Building on CathSim, the Expert Navigation Network is developed, a policy that fuses visual, kinematic, and force feedback for autonomous tool control. To mitigate data scarcity, the open-source, bi-planar fluoroscopic dataset Guide3D is proposed, comprising more than 8,700 annotated images for 3D guidewire reconstruction. Finally, SplineFormer, a transformer-based model, is introduced to directly predict guidewire geometry as continuous B-spline parameters, enabling interpretable, real-time navigation. The findings show that combining high-fidelity simulation, multimodal sensory fusion, and geometric modelling substantially improves autonomous endovascular navigation and supports safer, more precise minimally invasive procedures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18081
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Autonomous Navigation in Endovascular Interventions
Jianu, Tudor
Robotics
Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of global mortality, with minimally invasive treatment options offered through endovascular interventions. However, the precision and adaptability of current robotic systems for endovascular navigation are limited by heuristic control, low autonomy, and the absence of haptic feedback. This thesis presents an integrated AI-driven framework for autonomous guidewire navigation in complex vascular environments, addressing key challenges in data availability, simulation fidelity, and navigational accuracy. A high-fidelity, real-time simulation platform, CathSim, is introduced for reinforcement learning based catheter navigation, featuring anatomically accurate vascular models and contact dynamics. Building on CathSim, the Expert Navigation Network is developed, a policy that fuses visual, kinematic, and force feedback for autonomous tool control. To mitigate data scarcity, the open-source, bi-planar fluoroscopic dataset Guide3D is proposed, comprising more than 8,700 annotated images for 3D guidewire reconstruction. Finally, SplineFormer, a transformer-based model, is introduced to directly predict guidewire geometry as continuous B-spline parameters, enabling interpretable, real-time navigation. The findings show that combining high-fidelity simulation, multimodal sensory fusion, and geometric modelling substantially improves autonomous endovascular navigation and supports safer, more precise minimally invasive procedures.
title Towards Autonomous Navigation in Endovascular Interventions
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18081