Bioelectric navigation: A new paradigm for intravascular device guidance

Abstract

Inspired by the electrolocalization behavior of weakly electric fish,we introduce a novel catheter guidance system for interventional vascular procedures. Impedance measurements from electrodes on the catheter form an electric image of the internal geometry of the vessel. That electric image is then mapped to a pre-interventional model to determine the relative position of the catheter within the vessel tree. The catheter’s measurement of its surroundings is unaffected by movement of the surrounding tissue,so there is no need for deformable 2D/3D image registration. Experiments in a synthetic vessel tree and ex vivo biological tissue are presented. We employed dynamic time warping to map the empirical data to the pre-interventional simulation,and our system correctly identified the catheter’s path in 25/30 trials in a synthetic phantom and 9/9 trials in biological tissue. These first results demonstrated the capability and potential of Bioelectric Navigation as a non-ionizing technique to guide intravascular devices.