Kinematic characterization of a cardiac ablation catheter

Catheters are flexible devices widely used in minimally invasive cardiac surgeries. The limited maneuverability of currently available catheters necessitates a control system by which the catheter is moved inside the heart with more precision. To realize such a system, the first step is to model the catheter's movements in real-time. In this paper, a simplified approach is proposed to kinematically characterize a general single-segment active catheter. In this approach, the distal shaft of the flexible catheter is modeled as a rigid manipulator with coupled joints. To demonstrate the validity of the new model, experiments are conducted by using an existing steerable ablation catheter.