Research On Catheter Sidewall Tactile Sensor

As a revolutionary surgery, MIS (minimum invasive surgery) has been accepted by more and more surgeons and patients. Compared with traditional surgeries, MIS has several advantages, such as reducing the wound in surgery, shortening the recover time. However, except these advantages, there are also several problems. In the traditional surgery, the tactile information between the instrument and human body tissue can be directly sent to the surgeon by the instrument. But in MIS, because of the instruments in the surgery, the tactile information is hard to get in the operation. Therefore, the risk of the operation could be increased for lack of tactile information. The surgeon could damage the organs of human body by inappropriate operation.Based on the above reasons and the less attention on the catheter side wall tactile sensor, this thesis mainly introduces the design and fabrication of two kinds of tactile sensor which can obtain the tactile information for surgeons. One of the sensors is the single position tactile sensor; the other is the tactile sensor array. These sensors were made all by the PVDF polymer. Through these sensors, surgeons can get the tactile information between blood vessels and catheter side wall. The single position tactile sensor can only get the single position and single direction contact force information. On the other hand, the tactile sensor array can get the tactile information in different position and different direction.The main work of this thesis is the design and fabrication of two kinds sensors, electrical interface of the single position sensor and the scan control circuit for the sensor array. The last part of this thesis is the experiments for the sensors. The dynamic characteristic experiments were carried out for the single position tactile sensor. The mathematic model was built for the single position tactile sensor, too. In the end, we carried out the experiment in the artificial blood vessel and validate the performance of the developed sensors.