Monoplane 3D reconstruction of mapping ablation catheters: a feasibility study

PURPOSE: Radiofrequency (RF) catheter ablation has transformed treatment for arrhythmias and has become first-line therapy for some tachycardias. The precise localization of the arrhythmogenic site and the positioning of the RF catheter over that site are problematic: they can impair the efficiency of the procedure and are time consuming (several hours). This study evaluates the feasibility of using only single plane C-arm images in order to estimate the 3D coordinates of RF catheter electrodes in a cardiac phase. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The method makes use of a priori 3D model of the RF mapping catheter assuming rigid body motion equations in order to estimate the 3D locations of the catheter tip-electrodes in single view C-arm fluoroscopy images. Validation is performed on both synthetic and clinical data using computer simulation models. The authors' monoplane reconstruction algorithm is applied to a 3D helix mimicking the shape of a catheter and undergoing solely rigid motion. Similarly, the authors test the feasibility of recovering nonrigid motion by applying their method on true 3D coordinates of 13 ventricular markers from a sheep’s ventricle. RESULTS: The results of this study showed that the proposed monoplane algorithm recovers rigid motion adequately when using the spatial positions of a catheter in six consecutive C-arm image frames yielding maximum 3D root mean squares errors of 4.3 mm. On the other hand, the suggested algorithm did not recover nonrigid motion precisely as suggested by a maximum 3D root mean square value of 8 mm. CONCLUSION: Since RF catheter electrodes are rigid structures, the authors conclude that there is promise in recovering the 3D coordinates of the electrodes when making use of only single view images. Future work will involve adding nonrigid motion equations to their algorithm, which will then be applied to actual clinical data.