Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires in mechanical thrombectomy using inverse reinforcement learning
<|reference_start|>Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires in mechanical thrombectomy using inverse reinforcement learning: Purpose: Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires can enhance endovascular surgery safety and efficacy, reducing procedure times and operator radiation exposure. Integrating tele-operated robotics could widen access to time-sensitive emergency procedures like mechanical thrombectomy (MT). Reinforcement learning (RL) shows potential in endovascular navigation, yet its application encounters challenges without a reward signal. This study explores the viability of autonomous navigation in MT vasculature using inverse RL (IRL) to leverage expert demonstrations. Methods: This study established a simulation-based training and evaluation environment for MT navigation. We used IRL to infer reward functions from expert behaviour when navigating a guidewire and catheter. We utilized soft actor-critic to train models with various reward functions and compared their performance in silico. Results: We demonstrated feasibility of navigation using IRL. When evaluating single versus dual device (i.e. guidewire versus catheter and guidewire) tracking, both methods achieved high success rates of 95% and 96%, respectively. Dual-tracking, however, utilized both devices mimicking an expert. A success rate of 100% and procedure time of 22.6 s were obtained when training with a reward function obtained through reward shaping. This outperformed a dense reward function (96%, 24.9 s) and an IRL-derived reward function (48%, 59.2 s). Conclusions: We have contributed to the advancement of autonomous endovascular intervention navigation, particularly MT, by employing IRL. The results underscore the potential of using reward shaping to train models, offering a promising avenue for enhancing the accessibility and precision of MT. We envisage that future research can extend our methodology to diverse anatomical structures to enhance generalizability.<|reference_end|>
@article{robertshaw2024autonomous,
    title={Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires in mechanical
  thrombectomy using inverse reinforcement learning},
    author={Harry Robertshaw, Lennart Karstensen, Benjamin Jackson, Alejandro
  Granados, Thomas C. Booth},
    journal={Int J CARS (2024)},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1007/s11548-024-03208-w},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2406.12499},
    primaryClass={cs.LG cs.AI cs.RO}
}