Developing a Magnetically Stabilized Catheter for Cardiac Ablation with On-Board Actuation
One goal of heart surgery is to be as minimally invasive as possible. To achieve this, some procedures employ a guidewire-based system where the surgeon will insert a guidewire to the femoral artery, following it into the heart where the procedure can be performed. In the case of cardiac ablations, the ideal procedure involves applying a consistent force to the inner walls of the heart while it is beating. I aim to show that by including actuatable magnets in the tip of the catheter, the applied force can be made more consistent throughout the procedure without the need for external magnetic field generation. To do this, a model is developed to predict the behavior of the robot's tip under different actuation parameters, and a prototype is developed to verify this model experimentally.
Advisor: Professor Giovanni Pittiglio
Committee: Professor Vincent Aloi, Professor Pratap Rao
Zoom link: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/97676564811