Reprocessing of uni-directional Biosense Webster ablation catheters: a novel disassembly method: Extraction of the yielding parts and/or materials from the Thermocool Smarttouch SF Uni-directional ablation catheter

Annually, around 180,000 cardiac ablation procedures are performed as a result of people experiencing cardiac arrhythmia’s. During this ablation procedure, an ablation catheter is used to scar the problematic cardiac tissue after which the arrhythmia will stop. The ablation catheter is discarded after one single use. Incineration of these...

How to Close the Loop on Catheters: Exploring limitations and opportunities at the end-of-life of single-use catheters

While lives are saved through the use of medical devices; they have a significant negative impact on the environment. In particular single-use medical devices make up a large part of the healthcare sector’s negative environmental impact as they contribute significantly to generating more medical waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Approximately...

Hydraulic catheter device for treating chronic total occlusion: A feasibility study

Chronic total occlusion (CTO) occurs in approximately a third of all patients with coronary artery disease and is one of the most challenging types of conditions to treat. Minimally invasive methods like percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) show a high treating potential as well as low costs, short hospital stay and fast recovery. However,...

Catheter with Improved steerability for the TAVI Procedure: Design, Development and Validation

Aortic stenosis is one of the most serious heart valve diseases and is the result of calcification of the aortic valve leaflets. This calcification is irreversible and affect the functionality of the heart valves. The only treatment is an aortic valve replacement. The trend in heart valve replacement is moving from open heart surgery towards...

Advanced Path Planning for a Neurosurgical Flexible Catheter: Improving the performance of sampling-based motion planning

At Mechatronics in Medicine (MiM) Laboratory of Imperial College London, a neurosurgical steerable flexible probe ( STING) that is used to access deep brain lesions through curved trajectories is currently being developed. The focus of my research project is mainly on trajectory planning of the flexible probe i.e. investigation on how to...