Technique for Wireless Position Tracking of Intravascular Catheters: Performance Evaluation in a Vessel Phantom

Harald Busse¹, Gregor Thrmer¹, Nikita Garnov¹, Jrgen Haase², Thomas Kahn¹, Michael Moche¹

A new wireless technique for the tracking of intravascular catheters is presented. The semi-active approach uses a robust morphological image analysis tool to automatically detect the local signals from two small RF coils mounted on a commercial 6F catheter. A fast SSFP sequence at very low flip angles (≈0.3) provided sufficient marker contrast to reliably localize the catheter in a vessel phantom (≈97% of 1036 trials) within ≈350 ms. Tracking may be realized by continuously superimposing the marker coordinates on a roadmap (≈3 updates/second) or by adjusting the slice geometry of a fast MR scan to the actual catheter orientation.