Design and Fabrication of a Catheter Magnetic Navigation System for Cardiac Arrhythmias

In the past decade, remotely controlled catheter ablation has emerged as a novel approach to reduce fluoroscopy exposure and provide stable and reproducible catheter movement during cardiac surgeries for arrhythmias, and many groups have obtained very promising achievements in this research field. Meanwhile, the catheter magnetic navigation system (MNS) is very competitive among these catheter navigation systems since there are no moving parts in the magnet system. A catheter MNS that provides real-time navigation of the catheter in the beating heat is under development in the Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The catheter navigation system consists of eight spherically aligned electromagnets that generate the dynamically shaped magnetic field around the torso of the subject, eight four-phase high-current power supplies that excite the eight electromagnets to generate the needed magnetic field in time, and programmed magnetic navigation software that transfers the control signal to the electromagnets on the basis of the designated directions given by the joystick. The real-time shaping of the magnetic field functions for the 3-D direction change of a magnetized electrophysiology ablation catheter in the beating heart. EnSite-NavX™ 3-D electroanatomic mapping system is employed to integrate with the MNS. Detailed design, fabrication, and test of the remotely controlled MNS (RCMNS) are mainly introduced herein, and preliminary study on animals using RCMNS is on the way.