Towards Automatic Manipulation of Intra-cardiac Echocardiography Catheter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robotic manipulator for intra-cardiac echocardiography that automates view recovery and compensates for kinematic errors, aiming to reduce cognitive load and improve imaging precision during cardiac procedures.

Contribution

It presents a novel robotic platform with two application modules: view recovery and error compensation, enhancing ICE imaging automation and control accuracy.

Findings

Validated view recovery in phantom and animal experiments.

Demonstrated error compensation improves catheter tip control.

Robotic manipulator reduces procedure time and enhances imaging consistency.

Abstract

Intra-cardiac Echocardiography (ICE) is a powerful imaging modality for guiding electrophysiology and structural heart interventions. ICE provides real-time observation of anatomy, catheters, and emergent complications. However, this increased reliance on intraprocedural imaging creates a high cognitive demand on physicians who can often serve as interventionalist and imager. We present a robotic manipulator for ICE catheters to assist physicians with imaging and serve as a platform for developing processes for procedural automation. Herein, we introduce two application modules towards these goals: (1) a view recovery process that allows physicians to save views during intervention and automatically return with the push of a button and (2) a data-driven approach to compensate kinematic model errors that result from non-linear behaviors in catheter bending, providing more precise control of the catheter tip. View recovery is validated by repeated catheter positioning in cardiac phantom and animal experiments with position- and image-based analysis. We present a simplified calibration approach for error compensation and verify with complex rotation of the catheter in benchtop and phantom experiments under varying realistic curvature conditions. Results support that a robotic manipulator for ICE can provide an efficient and reproducible tool, potentially reducing execution time and promoting greater utilization of ICE imaging.