Stabilizing interventional instruments in the cardiovascular system: A classification of mechanisms

Positioning and stabilizing a catheter at the required location inside a vessel or the heart is a complicated task in interventional cardiology. In this review we provide a structured classification of catheter stabilization mechanisms to systematically assess their challenges during cardiac interventions. Commercially available, patented,...

First Expert Evaluation of a New Steerable Catheter in an Isolated Beating Heart

Purpose: In previous studies we developed two mechanical prototypes of steerable catheters: the Sigma, which uses joysticks to actuate two steerable tip segments, and the Epsilon, which has a handle that is an enlarged version of the tip. In this study, we present a first performance evaluation of the prototypes in the cardiac environment....

Evaluation of a multi-steerable catheter for cardiac interventions in a 3D-printed heart model

To overcome the challenges presented by complex 3-dimensional shapes and tortuous vasculature in the cardiovascular environment, we previously developed a prototype of a multi-steerable catheter having 4 DOFs controlled by two joysticks [1]. However, it remains unknown whether the added steering possibilities are beneficial in the cardiovascular...