Incorporating a Gaussian model at the catheter tip for improved registration of preoperative surface models

Atrial fibrillation is a common cardiac arrhythmia in which aberrant electrical activity cause the atria to quiver which results in irregular beating of the heart. Catheter ablation therapy is becoming increasingly popular in treating atrial fibrillation, a procedure in which an electrophysiologist guides a catheter into the left atrium and creates radiofrequency lesions to stop the arrhythmia. Typical visualization tools include bi-plane fluoroscopy, 2-D ultrasound, and electroanatomic maps, however, recently there has been increased interest in incorporating preoperative surface models into the procedure. Typical strategies for registration include landmark-based and surface-based methods. Drawbacks of these approaches include difficulty in accurately locating corresponding landmark pairs and the time required to sample surface points with a catheter. In this paper, we describe a new approach which models the catheter tip as a Gaussian kernel and eliminates the need to collect surface points by instead using the stream of continuosly tracked catheter points. We demonstrate the feasibility of this technique with a left atrial phantom model and compare the results with a standard surface based approach.