In vitro cardiac catheter navigation via augmented reality surgical guidance

Abstract

Catheter-driven cardiac interventions have emerged in response to the need of reducing invasiveness associated with the traditional cut-and-sew techniques. Catheter manipulation is traditionally performed under real-time fluoroscopy imaging, resulting in an overall trade-off of procedure invasiveness for radiation exposure of both the patient and clinical staff. Our approach to reducing and potentially eliminating the use of flouroscopy in the operating room entails the use of multi-modality imaging and magnetic tracking technologies, wrapped together into an augmented reality environment for enhanced intra-procedure visualization and guidance. Here we performed an in vitro study in which a catheter was guided to specific targets located on the endocardial atrial surface of a beating heart phantom. "Therapy delivery" was modeled in the context of a blinded procedure, mimicking a beating heart, intracardiac intervention. The users navigated the tip of a magnetically tracked Freezor 5 CRYOCATH catheter to the specified targets. Procedure accuracy was determined as the distance between the tracked catheter tip and the tracked surgical target at the time of contact, and it was assessed under three different guidance modalities: endoscopic, augmented reality, and ultrasound image guidance. The overall RMS targeting accuracy achieved under augmented reality guidance averaged to 1.1 mm. This guidance modality shows significant improvements in both procedure accuracy and duration over ultrasound image guidance alone, while maintianing an overall targeting accuracy comparable to that achieved under endoscopic guidance.