Cardiac Catheter Robot: Forssmann's Arm to ABB

A cardiac catheter robot lets a doctor push, pull and twist the thin wires and tubes that travel through blood vessels to the heart, without standing next to the X-ray tube. The job it automates is almost a century old. This post follows it from a young German doctor who tried it on himself, through the balloon that opened blocked arteries, to the remote controlled systems that hospitals are buying in 2026. It also looks at where ABB's robots fit in this field today, and at what still holds remote heart procedures back.

A cardiac catheterization in the cath lab at Naval Medical Center San Diego, with the live X-ray image on the big screen, 2020. Photo: Navy Medicine via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How heart catheters went from a self experiment to the cath lab

In 1929 Werner Forssmann was a junior doctor in Eberswalde, near Berlin. He believed a catheter could be passed through a vein into the heart to give drugs or measure pressure, while most of his seniors thought it would kill the patient. So he numbed his own arm, slid a urinary catheter into a vein and walked down to the X-ray room, where he pushed it about 60 cm until it lay in his heart. The X-ray film proved it worked. Forssmann later shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the idea.

Werner Forssmann, who passed a catheter into his own heart in Eberswalde in 1929. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

For decades catheters were used mainly to look and measure. Then in September 1977 Andreas Gruentzig, working in Zurich, threaded a small balloon on a catheter into a narrowed coronary artery and inflated it to open the blockage. That first coronary angioplasty started interventional cardiology as we know it. Stents and drug coated stents followed, and the catheterization lab, a room built around an X-ray system, a patient table and a bank of monitors, became one of the busiest places in any large hospital.

The tip of a dilatation catheter with its balloon, the kind of device Gruentzig used for angioplasty, next to a ruler in centimeters. Photo: Magnus Maier / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Every one of those procedures is guided by live X-ray images. The patient gets a short dose, but the cardiologist and nurses stand beside the table day after day and wear heavy lead aprons to protect themselves. Years of that weight are linked to back and neck trouble, and the scatter radiation does not stop at the apron. The first answer was a remote cockpit. Corindus, founded in Israel in 2002 by cardiologist Rafael Beyar and Tal Wenderow, built the CorPath system, which let a doctor move guidewires and stents from a shielded console a few metres away.

A radiation protection apron and gloves used between 1920 and 1958. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Where cardiac catheter robots stand in 2026

Corindus was bought by Siemens Healthineers in 2019 for about $1.1 billion, and newer companies have since joined the field. The most active this autumn is Microbot Medical. On 6 October 2026 it signed a three year exclusive deal with Medtechnica to sell its LIBERTY Endovascular Robotic System in Israel, after Israeli approval in May. Microbot describes LIBERTY as the only FDA cleared, single use, remotely operated robot for peripheral endovascular procedures, aimed at reducing radiation exposure and physical strain. Emory was one of the first US hospitals to adopt it.

A team in lead and sterile gowns works at the table during a cardiac catheterization at Naval Medical Center San Diego, 2020. Photo: Navy Medicine via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Stroke care may be next. In late August Philips said it had been selected for up to $33.7 million from ARPA-H, the US health research agency, for a project called A-RISE. With Johns Hopkins and Boston University, Philips is working on a fluid driven, steerable catheter guided by imitation learning, meant to reach a clot in the brain under increasing levels of supervised autonomy. Philips points to access: about 335,000 Americans a year could benefit from thrombectomy, yet only around 12 percent receive it, often because the nearest capable hospital is too far away.

Cath lab staff at Naval Medical Center San Diego during a procedure, with X-ray and monitoring screens above the table, 2021. Photo: Navy Medicine via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB does not make catheter robots, and it has no announced project in this field. Its robots meet cardiology in hospital labs and on production lines. In 2019 ABB announced a healthcare research hub at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and showed a mobile YuMi concept for hospital laboratories, handling tasks like loading centrifuges and pipetting. The catheters, balloons and guidewires these robots steer are themselves made in clean rooms where small arms such as YuMi or the IRB 1200 could handle fine assembly. Our post on medical device manufacturing covers that side in detail.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge, one of the lab tasks ABB showed for hospitals. Photo: ABB

What comes next for remote heart procedures

If a robot at the bedside can be driven from a console in another city, a stroke or heart attack patient in a small hospital could be treated by a specialist far away. Surgeons have already tested long distance robotic surgery, as our surgical robot history post explains, but catheter work needs very low network delay and a trained team on site to place the sheath, manage the patient and take over if the link drops. Regulators will want strong evidence before remote catheter procedures become routine.

A cardiologist handles a catheter and syringe at the table, the hands on work a remote robot would take over. Photo: Navy Medicine via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Factories feel the change too. Single use systems like LIBERTY mean a disposable robotic unit for every procedure, so production volume grows with each hospital that signs up. That is the kind of repetitive, clean, precise assembly where an ABB cobot such as GoFa CRB 15000 or a YuMi could, in principle, work beside people, with cells planned and tested first in RobotStudio. No ABB customer project of this kind has been announced, so treat it as a possibility.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table, the kind of arm that could assemble small devices beside people. Photo: ABB

Robotic catheter systems are expensive, and each procedure adds disposable cost that a hospital has to justify against a skilled human who can already do the work. Doctors need training on a new console and lose some of the tactile feel they rely on. The field has already seen companies change hands, so buyers will watch which systems last. Even so, the aim has stayed the same since the first cockpit: move the doctor out of the X-ray beam and out of the lead apron, while the doctor still makes every decision.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

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