Automated catheter tip repositioning for intra-cardiac echocardiography.

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 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 [Formula: see text] mm and catheter image orientation accuracy of [Formula: see text] in animal studies, and [Formula: see text]mm and [Formula: see text] in heart phantom studies, respectively. Our proposed method is also successfully used during transseptal puncture in animals without complications, showing the possibility for fluoro-less transseptal 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.