mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Autonomous Catheterization with Open-source Simulator and Expert Trajectory

arXiv 2401.09059 ↗First posted 17 Jan 2024cs.RO cs.CVcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

Endovascular robots have been actively developed in both academia and industry. However, progress toward autonomous catheterization is often hampered by the widespread use of closed-source simulators and physical phantoms. Additionally, the acquisition of large-scale datasets for training machine learning algorithms with endovascular robots is usually infeasible due to expensive medical procedures. In this chapter, we introduce CathSim, the first open-source simulator for endovascular intervention to address these limitations. CathSim emphasizes real-time performance to enable rapid development and testing of learning algorithms. We validate CathSim against the real robot and show that our simulator can successfully mimic the behavior of the real robot. Based on CathSim, we develop a multimodal expert navigation network and demonstrate its effectiveness in downstream endovascular navigation tasks. The intensive experimental results suggest that CathSim has the potential to significantly accelerate research in the autonomous catheterization field. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/airvlab/cathsim.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 77 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2024.

Builds on

22 of 77 references.

References · 22

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  11. 2020End-to-End Real-time Catheter Segmentation with Optical Flow-Guided Warping during Endovascular Interventioncited by 20
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10 more
  1. 2021Light-weight Deformable Registration using Adversarial Learning with Distilling Knowledgecited by 12
  2. 2021Deep reinforcement learning for guidewire navigation in coronary artery phantomcited by 9
  3. 20223D Perception based Imitation Learning under Limited Demonstration for Laparoscope Control in Robotic Surgerycited by 9
  4. 2018Automatic catheter detection in pediatric X-ray images using a scale-recurrent network and synthetic datacited by 7
  5. 2020Towards Autonomous Eye Surgery by Combining Deep Imitation Learning with Optimal Controlcited by 6
  6. 2023Detecting the Sensing Area of A Laparoscopic Probe in Minimally Invasive Cancer Surgerycited by 5
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  8. 2021A Novel Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning with Episodic Policy Transfer for PID-Based Control in Cardiac Catheterization Robotscited by 2
  9. 2023Translating Simulation Images to X-ray Images via Multi-Scale Semantic Matchingcited by 1
  10. 20233D Guidewire Shape Reconstruction from Monoplane Fluoroscopic Imagescited by 1

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 2.

4 papers.

  1. 2024CathAction: A Benchmark for Endovascular Intervention Understandingcited by 5
  2. 2024Robust Path Planning via Learning from Demonstrations for Robotic Catheters in Deformable Environmentscited by 2
  3. 2025Advancing Embodied Intelligence in Robotic-Assisted Endovascular Procedures: A Systematic Review of AI Solutionscited by 2
  4. 2025SplineFormer: An Explainable Transformer-Based Approach for Autonomous Endovascular Navigationcited by 0