Magnetically Guided Catheters

Catheters and endoscopes are commonly used by medical professionals to perform minimally invasive inspections, obtain biopsies, deliver drugs to specific regions, and perform ablative procedures. Manual methods of catheter shaping require either a long mechanical guide wire transmission chain to pull on the tip or repeated extraction, reshaping, and reinsertion to plastically reshape the tip. By embedding a small magnet in the tip of a catheter, it is possible to control the pose of the tip directly through magnetic forces and torques. Recently, the advances made in magnetic manipulation on the micro-scale have been applied to catheter manipulation on the macro-scale to perform mapping and ablation of the heart, reducing the patient’s and physician’s exposure to fluoroscopic radiation. One major advantage of magnetic manipulation, not exploited in heart procedures, is the reduction in catheter size by removing the need for the mechanical guide wires. This project explores the capabilities and limitations of magnetic catheter manipulation in areas that are currently hard to reach with manual methods such as the brain. This project also addresses the practical challenges of localizing the catheter relative to the manipulation system for low-level control feedback to the magnetic control system, and relative to the patient's physiology for high-level feedback to the physician.