Ablation Catheter Tracking with Ultrawideband Radar

Minimally invasive surgeries result in less trauma, less bleeding and faster recovery compared to traditional open surgeries. Optical tracking systems are used to detect and localize surgical tools during the procedure. Complications arise when there are adverse lighting conditions, or the tools are occluded by tissue, smoke, or blood spatters. To address this issue, a radar-based tracking solution was proposed motivated by its ability to detect objects through occlusions. In this paper, the efficacy of ultrawideband radar for tracking of an ablation catheter was investigated. Three experiments were conducted to test the localization and position tracking of the catheter tip and the detection of catheter pose. Results from the experiment show that a single sensor could localize and track the position of the catheter with 1cm of spatial accuracy, and an array of sensors could be implemented for pose detection. We also discuss the existing limitations of the proposed radar-based procedure.