Tele-Operated Robotic Thrombectomy in Acute Stroke

In 2018 there were over 100 000 stroke cases across the United Kingdom (UK) of which an estimated 87% are ischaemic strokes. Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) is a time-sensitive emergency procedure for patients who had ischaemic stroke leading to improved health outcomes. While an estimated 10% of ischaemic stroke patients are eligible for MT approximately 1.8% of patients receive the treatment. This discrepancy is mainly caused by the geographic availability of MT and the time sensitive nature of the procedure (in most cases <6 hours to arterial puncture). There are currently 24 Neuroscience centres in the UK that are unable to provide a 24 hour service to the entire population of the UK. In other countries where the population is more widespread the situation is worse.

The proposed solution described by the project is to develop a robotic system that allows for Tele-operated control of the MT equipment. This will eliminate the travel time of the patient to the operating room (OR) and significantly increase the number of patients that are eligible for the procedure.

There are a number of elements that are required for the development of such a robotic system, including:

- The design of the controller that will be set up with the clinician.
- The responder device that will need to manipulate a wide range of catheter and guidewire devices
- An experiment into the latency of the system will need to be conducted
- A suitable testing methodology will need to be devised in order to validate the robotic system.

Finally these elements will need to be combined into a functioning robust robotic system.