ROBOT-ASSISTED ENDOVASCULAR INTERVENTIONS: Challenges and Opportunities

ICRA 2025 Full Day Workshop (May 19, 2025)

Abstract

Vascular diseases are leading causes of ischemic heart disease and stroke and lead to significant global mortality. Endovascular interventions, such as neuroendovascular and cardiovascular interventions are a minimally invasive approach that provides the benefit of faster recovery, less general anesthesia, reduced blood loss, and lower mortality compared to open surgery. This approach now includes advanced procedures like complex aneurysm repair, stent placement for peripheral artery disease, valve replacement, and novel therapy delivery beyond traditional cardiac ablation, angioplasty, and stenting.

Despite its advantages, endovascular intervention face limitations such as excessive radiation exposure, lack of 3D mapping and haptic feedback. Robotically steerable catheter and guidewire technologies have emerged as a promising solution, enhancing precision, stability, reducing radiation doses, and improving access to complex anatomies.

The workshop aims to explore clinical opportunities, technical requirements, and regulatory challenges for robot-assisted endovascular interventions. It seeks to unite researchers, engineers, and clinicians from academia and industry to discuss and identify new applications and barriers in this field. The workshop’s goal is to foster collaboration between academia and industry to address and overcome the technical, clinical, regulatory, and translational challenges for practical clinical implementation of robotic endovascular interventions.

Workshop Highlights

1. This ICRA 2025 Workshop will provide the framework to engage researchers, clinicians, and companies to discuss about the future of robot-assisted endovascular interventions including clinical opportunities, technical requirements, and regulatory and translational challenges.
2. It will involve in-person and virtual (invited/keynote) presentations. Through the virtual option, it will enable researchers and other participants, who might not be able to join in person or who usually do not attend robotics-related conferences, to attend and participate in the workshop.
3. Focused on facilitating the interaction between junior and experienced researchers.
4. Clinical speakers will outline the challenges in the field and the feasibility of the presented technology.
5. Gender and geographical diversity among the invited speakers is our priority.

Organizers

Jaydev P. Desai, FIEEE, FAIMBE, FASME
Peterson Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Email: jaydev@gatech.edu    URL:  https://bme.gatech.edu/bme/faculty/Jaydev-Desai

Giulio Dagnino
Associate Professor of Medical Robotics
RaM Lab, University of Twente, NL
Email: g.dagnino@utwente.nl    URL: https://people.utwente.nl/g.dagnino

Speakers

Alan Lumsden – Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center
Bradley Nelson – ETH Zurich
Brooks Lindsey – Georgia Institute of Technology
Giulio Dagnino – University of Twente
Islam Khalil – University of Twente
Jaydev P. Desai – Georgia Institute of Technology
Jonathan Grossberg – Emory University
Lindsey Folio – Folio Consulting Group
Marco Gotte – Amsterdam UMC
Joanna D. Bertram -Duke University
Thanh Nho Do – UNSW Sydney
Xuanhe Zhao – MIT

Tentative Schedule

Call for Abstracts for Poster Presentations