An impedance-based catheter positioning system for cardiac mapping and navigation.

Over the last years, nonfluoroscopic in vivo cardiac mapping and navigation systems have been developed and successfully applied in clinical electrophysiology. Clearly, a trend can be observed to introduce more sensors into the measurement system so that physiological information can be gathered simultaneously and more efficiently and the duration of procedure can be shortened significantly. However, it would not be realistic to equip each catheter electrode with a localizer, e.g., by embedding a miniature magnetic location sensor. Therefore, in this paper, an alternate approach has been worked out to efficiently localize multiple catheter electrodes by considering the impedance between electrodes in the heart and electrode patches on the body surface. In application of the new technique, no additional expensive and sophisticated hardware is required other than the currently existing cardiac navigation system. A tank model and a computerized realistic human model are employed to support the development of the positioning system. In the simulation study, the new approach achieves an average localization error of less than 1 mm, which proves the feasibility of the impedance-based catheter positioning system. Consequently, the new positioning system can provide an inexpensive and accurate solution to improve the efficiency and efficacy of catheter ablation.