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Transarterial interventions are routine procedures for interventional radiologists. Unfortunately, in cases where tortuous and/or geometrically complex anatomy are encountered the inability to effectively maneuver conventional microcatheters (or guidewires) safely poses a substantial everyday challenge for interventionalists. The innovation of soft robotic microcatheters capable of steering and navigation through small, complex, tortuous, and/or delicate vasculature holds unique promise for a wide range of endovascular interventions currently considered challenging or high risk and represents a paradigm shift from standard catheter/wire technologies. Our team demonstrated two breakthrough capabilities: (i) a strategy for fabricating microfluidic multilumen tubing to serve as the microcatheter tubing, and (ii) the use of "Two-Photon Direct Laser Writing (DLW)" for 3D printing soft microrobotic actuators with submicron-scale resolutions. By uniting these strategies, a new class of microcatheter can be created that overcomes the maneuverability deficits that lead to unsuccessful catheterization attempts and/or increase the risk of complications in arterial interventions. We have fabricated multi-lumen tubing with an outer diameter of roughly 2.1 FR and inner microfluidic channels enabling actuation of 0.21 FR-in-diameter. Further, we have demonstrated a 3D microprinted soft robotic unidirectional microcatheter tip that is fluidically sealed to a microfluidic chip, capable of achieving deflection angles greater than 115 degrees and burst pressures larger than 600 kPa. This preliminary technology serves as the basis of future multidirectional microcatheters designs and innovations. Our unique additive micromanufacturing techniques have the potential to also transform wide-ranging catheter-based procedures in interventional radiology (IR) throughout the body. In this work we demonstrate the fabrication of multi-lumen tubing with inner microfluidic channels that would allow for unidirectional actuation of our 3D printed microcatheter tip. This preliminary work serves as the basis for a steerable soft robotic microcatheter for arterial interventions in IR. We believe this can improve catheterization success rates, decrease the intervention time, and reduce the number of complications.
Félix et al. (Wed,) studied this question.