Endovascular interventions—i.e., minimally invasive procedures that involve navigating guidewires and/or microcatheters through a patient's vasculature to access target treatment sites—have emerged as a preferable alternative to traditional open surgery in many clinical contexts. Unfortunately, maneuverability constraints inherent to conventional guidewire‐microcatheter systems can hinder effective navigation to target sites, elevating the risk of procedural complications or failed catheterization. Soft robotic surgical instruments that harness fluidic actuation schemes hold unique promise to overcome such challenges; however, manufacturing‐induced limitations remain a critical barrier to their miniaturization, reproducibility, and clinical translation. To address these issues, in this work, a novel additive manufacturing strategy is presented to realize fluidically steerable soft robotic microcatheters via “two‐photon direct laser writing (DLW)”. As an exemplar relevant to 3‐French (1 mm‐in‐diameter) microcatheters used for transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), a 3D‐printed soft microrobotic tip is fabricated, which enables localized steering driven by microfluidic inputs while simultaneously facilitating fluidic payload delivery through a central lumen. By providing a pathway to new classes of soft robotic microsurgical instruments that enable on‐demand steerability via fluidic means, the presented strategy offers notable potential for navigating narrow, complex, tortuous, and/or delicate vasculature to enhance the safety and efficacy of endovascular therapy.
Felix et al. (Tue,) studied this question.