Ponraj Chinnadurai

Young-Ho Kim, Jarrod Collins, Zhongyu Li et al.

Purpose: Intra-Cardiac Echocardiography (ICE) is a powerful imaging modality for guiding cardiac electrophysiology and structural heart interventions. ICE provides real-time observation of anatomy and devices, while enabling direct monitoring of potential complications. In single operator settings, the physician needs to switch back-and-forth between the ICE catheter and therapy device, making continuous ICE support impossible. Two operators setup are therefore sometimes implemented, with the challenge of increase room occupation and cost. Two operator setups are sometimes implemented, but increase procedural costs and room occupation. Methods: ICE catheter robotic control system is developed with automated catheter tip repositioning (i.e. view recovery) method, which can reproduce important views previously navigated to and saved by the user. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated and evaluated in a combination of heart phantom and animal experiments. Results: Automated ICE view recovery achieved catheter tip position accuracy of 2.09 +/-0.90 mm and catheter image orientation accuracy of 3.93 +/- 2.07 degree in animal studies, and 0.67 +/- 0.79 mm and 0.37 +/- 0.19 degree in heart phantom studies, respectively. Our proposed method is also successfully used during transeptal puncture in animals without complications, showing the possibility for fluoro-less transeptal puncture with ICE catheter robot. Conclusion: Robotic ICE imaging has the potential to provide precise and reproducible anatomical views, which can reduce overall execution time, labor burden of procedures, and x-ray usage for a range of cardiac procedures. Keywords: Automated View Recovery, Path Planning, Intra-cardiac echocardiography (ICE), Catheter, Tendon-driven manipulator, Cardiac Imaging

Young-Ho Kim, Jarrod Collins, Zhongyu Li et al.

Intra-cardiac Echocardiography (ICE) is a powerful imaging modality for guiding electrophysiology and structural heart interventions. ICE provides real-time observation of anatomy, catheters, and emergent complications. However, this increased reliance on intraprocedural imaging creates a high cognitive demand on physicians who can often serve as interventionalist and imager. We present a robotic manipulator for ICE catheters to assist physicians with imaging and serve as a platform for developing processes for procedural automation. Herein, we introduce two application modules towards these goals: (1) a view recovery process that allows physicians to save views during intervention and automatically return with the push of a button and (2) a data-driven approach to compensate kinematic model errors that result from non-linear behaviors in catheter bending, providing more precise control of the catheter tip. View recovery is validated by repeated catheter positioning in cardiac phantom and animal experiments with position- and image-based analysis. We present a simplified calibration approach for error compensation and verify with complex rotation of the catheter in benchtop and phantom experiments under varying realistic curvature conditions. Results support that a robotic manipulator for ICE can provide an efficient and reproducible tool, potentially reducing execution time and promoting greater utilization of ICE imaging.