Abstract
Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are state-of-the-art medical technologies for the recovery of organs and their functions. Presently, myocardial cell sheets are employed in the clinical treatment of heart disorders. However, it is extremely difficult to handle fragile cell sheets without any damaging their form or function. To overcome this problem, we plan to develop a novel robotic system for myocardial cell sheet implantation. It measures the heart surface motion less invasively, and it synchronizes the position and posture of the manipulator that holds the cell sheet with the heart surface motion, thereby reducing the mechanical damage to the cell sheet during a transplantation procedure. We have developed heart surface motion sensing system for less invasive measurement using a miniature camera. We evaluated the system using a beating porcine heart. The result shows that we can measured with an average error of 1.81 ± 0.82 pixels (n = 100 frames).
