A new robotic ultrasound system for tracking a catheter with an active piezoelectric element

Abstract

Robotic-assisted catheter insertion is becoming increasingly popular due to its potential applications including cardiac catheterization. Typically, catheters are tracked during insertion procedures to verify the location of the tip relative to anatomy or features of interest. To this end, many catheter tracking systems have been proposed in the literature. Current approaches such as visual servoing are computationally intensive and sometimes require harmful ionizing radiation (X-rays) for tip localization. Conversely, other approaches use 3D ultrasound probes which can be prohibitively expensive. In contrast, we propose an ultrasound-enabled robotic catheter tracking system that uses a 2D ultrasound probe and an active piezoelectric element to track the tip of a catheter. This approach has the potential to guide catheters from initial insertion, in a vein of the groin, to final placement at a target area inside of the heart. During the tracking process, no information from the ultrasound image is necessary; however, this information can be used to help clinicians guide the catheter or to perform diagnostic procedures. In this paper, we outline this procedure by first discussing the individual components of the system and then by describing our methodology for tracking the catheter tip. Next, we simulate the system in ROS to test its effectiveness, and finally we experimentally verify that a robotic arm equipped with a 2D ultrasound probe can track a catheter in a multi-vein phantom. Furthermore, the data collected during tracking can be used to virtually reconstruct the 3D structure of veins while tracking.