Investigation of catheter curvature and genetic algorithms in conductance catheter optimization.

Catheter curvature affects accuracy of intra-ventricular blood volume measurement when using conductance catheter techniques, especially with irregular geometries, such as in the right ventricle. To investigate this effect, we present results from using different curved catheter configurations and different numbers of electrodes in a simple Finite Element model. It was found that there is an apparent increase in accuracy with curvature, due to greater linearity in the field in the region of the measurement electrodes, which are located farther from the source electrodes as curvature increases. Also, optimization using Genetic Algorithms is presented as a method to find the optimal distribution of measurement electrodes. We plan to extend these results to develop improved electrode configurations for using in blood volume measurement in the right ventricle.