Endovascular Detection of Catheter-Thrombus Contact by Vacuum Excitation.

Objective: The objective of this work is to introduce and demonstrate the effectiveness of a novel sensing modality for contact detection between an off-the-shelf aspiration catheter and a thrombus.

Methods: A custom robotic actuator with a pressure sensor was used to generate an oscillatory vacuum excitation and sense the pressure inside the extracorporeal portion of the catheter. Vacuum pressure profiles and robotic motion data were used to train a support vector machine (SVM) classification model to detect contact between the aspiration catheter tip and a mock thrombus.