Ultrasound Servoing of Catheters for Beating Heart Valve Repair

Abstract

Abstract. Robotic cardiac catheters have the potential to revolutionize heart surgery by extending minimally invasive techniques to complex surgical repairs inside the heart. However, catheter technologies are currently unable to track fast tissue motion, which is required to perform delicate procedures inside a beating heart. This paper presents an actuated catheter tool that compensates for the motion of heart structures like the mitral valve apparatus by servoing a catheter guidewire inside a flexible sheath. We examine design and operation parameters and establish that friction and backlash limit the tracking performance of the catheter system. Based on the results of these experiments, we implement compensation methods to improve trajectory tracking. The catheter system is then integrated with an ultrasound-based visual servoing system to enable fast tissue tracking. In vivo tests show RMS tracking errors of 0.77 mm for following the porcine mitral valve annulus trajectory. The results demonstrate that an ultrasound-guided robotic catheter system can accurately track the fast motion of the mitral valve.

Robotic catheter cardiac ablation combining ultrasound guidance and force control

“…The use of the 3DUS complicates the force tracking process because of the importance of the target position prediction, as discussed above in section 2.1. Even in the controlled environment of the water tank experiment, the system performance varied between each trial due to the quality of the EKF tissue position prediction component of the visual servoing system described in Section 2.1 (Yuen et al 2010). In spite of these limitations, performance values of 0.08 N RMS errors were achieved for the sinusoidal trajectory ( Figure 14 ).…”

“…A GPU-based Radon transform algorithm finds the catheter axis in real-time. The target tissue is then located using the flashlight tissue tracker algorithm, which projects the instrument axis forward through the image volume until tissue is encountered (Yuen et al 2010). This method allows the clinician to designate the target to be tracked by simply pointing at it with the catheter.…”

Guidance of a high dexterity robot under 3D ultrasound for minimally invasive retrieval of foreign bodies from a beating heart

“…In water tank experiments, the tracking error of a one-DOF heartbeat compensation device for mitral valve repair was found to be about 1.0 mm when using a predictive controller running at an 8-Hz control rate [15]. This work was extended to ultrasound servoing of a cardiac catheter [16].…”

Epipolar Geometry for Vision-guided Laser Surgery

“…Simulation experiment have been used to validate the developments. In (Kesner et al, 2010) authors have integrated heart motion compensation in the 3D positioning of a catheter using 3D ultrasound images. A Kalman filtering has allowed to take into account the 50-100 ms delay of acquisition and a tracking error of 0.77 mm was obtained with in vivo tests with pigs.…”