Electromagnetic Tracking System for Neurovascular Interventions

Abstract

Electromagnetic tracking systems (EMTS) are widely used in a computer-assisted surgery, motion capture, kinematic studies and military applications. The main application in the medical domain represents minimal invasive surgery. For this purpose, the EMTS systems are integrated into the surgery device, i.e. needle, endoscope or catheter supporting tracking of this device within the human body without X-ray radiation. However, in neurovascular interventions this technique hardly could be applied so far. This is mainly due to a too large size of the receiver coils which have to be integrated into the microcatheter. In this paper we present such a microcatheter for neurovascular interventions featured with a 5 DOF sensor enabling tracking of the catheter tip by a commercial EMTS system and first evaluation of its accuracy.

Electromagnetic Tracking in Medicine—A Review of Technology, Validation, and Applications

“…Many studies assessing EM tracking systems for CAI can be found in the literature, e.g., [3,6,7,15,19,25,36,39,45,51,59,60,61,66,74,82,83,86,89,102,120,122,152,154,159,165,169,170,172,196,202,206,207]. However, in many cases, the results of these studies are not comparable because different measurement protocols and evaluation methods were used.…”

“…Phantoms of different anatomical structures such as the abdomen [199], the skull [165] and vessels [15] have been used. Some assessments have even been performed during actual interventions inside the human body [86,172].…”

“…For neurosurgical applications, an increased tracking error due to metallic instruments was found [165]. Although still experimental, Bien et al successfully tracked a catheter by including a guide wire inside a vessel model [15].…”