Evaluation in vitro of a treatment planning algorithm for an epicardial crawling robot.

HeartLander is a small, mobile robot designed to assist surgical procedures on the surface of the heart. It crawls within the pericardial sac surrounding the heart. Numerous potential clinical uses for HeartLander involve injections or other interventions at multiple locations on the epicardial surface. To minimize treatment time, we have developed an algorithm that optimizes a plan for reaching a given set of treatment targets. Results from in vitro evaluation on a beating heart model show improvement over a greedy technique.