Learning-based autonomous vascular guidewire navigation without human demonstration in the venous system of a porcine liver

PURPOSE: The navigation of endovascular guidewires is a dexterous task where physicians and patients can benefit from automation. Machine learning-based controllers are promising to help master this task. However, human-generated training data are scarce and resource-intensive to generate. We investigate if a neural network-based controller trained without human-generated data can learn human-like behaviors. METHODS: We trained and evaluated a neural network-based controller via deep reinforcement learning in a finite element simulation to navigate the venous system of a porcine liver without human-generated data. The behavior is compared to manual expert navigation, and real-world transferability is evaluated. RESULTS: The controller achieves a success rate of 100% in simulation. The controller applies a wiggling behavior, where the guidewire tip is continuously rotated alternately clockwise and counterclockwise like the human expert applies. In the ex vivo porcine liver, the success rate drops to 30%, because either the wrong branch is probed, or the guidewire becomes entangled. CONCLUSION: In this work, we prove that a learning-based controller is capable of learning human-like guidewire navigation behavior without human-generated data, therefore, mitigating the requirement to produce resource-intensive human-generated training data. Limitations are the restriction to one vessel geometry, the neglected safeness of navigation, and the reduced transferability to the real world. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11548-022-02646-8.