Beating-heart mitral valve chordal replacement.

Replacing open-heart surgical procedures with beating-heart interventions substantially decreases the trauma and risk of a procedure. One of the most challenging procedures to perform on the beating heart is valve repair. To address this need, this paper proposes a tool for replacing mitral valve chordae to correct regurgitation. The chordae is secured to the papillary muscle and leaflet using NiTi tissue anchors that also incorporate an internal adjustment mechanism to enable initial adjustment as well as subsequent readjustment of chordae length. Efficacy of the proposed tool for chordae replacement and reduction of regurgitation was demonstrated in an ex-vivo heart simulator.

Quasistatic Modeling of Concentric Tube Robots with External Loads.

Concentric tube robots are a subset of continuum robots constructed by combining pre-curved elastic tubes. As the tubes are rotated and translated with respect to each other, their curvatures interact elastically, enabling control of the robot's tip configuration as well as the curvature along its length. This technology is projected to be useful in many types of minimally invasive medical procedures. Because these robots are flexible by design, they deflect considerably when applying forces to the external environment. Thus, in contrast to rigid-link robots, their kinematic and static force models are coupled. This paper derives a multi-tube quasistatic model that relates tube rotations and translations together with externally applied loads to robot shape and tip configuration. The model can be applied in robot design, procedure planning as well as control. For validation, the multi-tube model is compared experimentally to a computationally-efficient single-tube approximate model.