Demonstration of a Novel Catheter Guiding Method for the Ablative Therapy of Ventricular Tachycardia

Current technologies used to guide the radio frequency ablation of ventricular tachycardia are frequently unable to rapidly and accurately localize the site of origin of an arrhythmia, restricting treatment to patients with hemodynamically stable arrhythmias. We investigate the effectiveness of a new rapid inverse algorithm which is based on a single-equivalent dipole representation of cardiac electrical activity. We conducted experiments in a saline volume conductor that involved the guidance of a moving catheter towards the location of a stationary dipole, using only the dipole positions calculated by the inverse algorithm. The algorithm was able to guide the moving catheter tip to well within 2 mm of the stationary dipole in 29 out of 30 experiments. These results suggest that this method has great potential to direct radio- frequency ablation procedures, including in the currently untreatable patient population with hemodynamically unstable arrhythmias.