By Christoff Heunis, Jakub Sikorski, and Sarthak Misra Flexible Instruments for Endovascular Interventions E ndovascular surgery has gained broad acceptance in the last few years. The current practice of endovascular procedures is limited by factors including patient-specific operation requirements, high-risk surgery procedures, and time-consuming operations. To address this, magnetically actuated surgical catheters have been introduced to the field of surgical robotics. Recently, advances in steerable catheters and developments in magnetic steering have been studied. However, limited research has been conducted to quantify the effectiveness of magnetic actuation for catheterization procedures. Endovascular interventions employing magnetically actuated catheters deliver the promise of higher accuracy and shorter Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2017.2787784 Date of publication: 22 March 2018 Improved Magnetic Steering, Actuation, and Image-Guided Surgical Instruments 1070-9932/18©2018IEEE ©istockphoto.com/sudok1 SEptEMBEr 2018 * IEEE rOBOtICS & AUtOMAtION MAGAZINE * 71http://www.istockphoto.com/sudok1