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[Project image] Computer Assisted Medical Instrument Navigation
Head: Takeo Kanade
Contact: Hua Zhong (hzhong@andrew.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213


For more information, see this project's homepage.

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Project Description

Our project is to build a system to help clinicians to precisely navigate various catheters inside human hearts. These catheters could be ablation catheters for left atrium ablation procedure which cures Atrial Fibrillation. They can also be medicine injection catheters or other kinds of catheters for different procedures. With our navigation system, doctors can perform complex heart surgeries without opening patientsÂ’ chest. It also makes many procedures more efficient and easier to execute; thus more patients can be treated.

Our navigation system employees a 3D ultrasound catheter which can quickly scan the shape of the inner heart wall in real time (we call this "Virtual Touch") during the operation and then registers this intra-operative shape measurement with pre-operative high resolution CT images to enable realtime and precise navigation of medical instruments inside a human heart.

Because the heart is beating, to capture and navigate in a living heart, we use 4D (3D space + time) registration and navigation. All shape measurements will be synchronized by ECG (EKG) signals and registered with our time-space registration algorithm using EM.

Personnel

Name Title Email Address
Takeo's personal homepage Takeo Kanade U.A. and Helen Whitaker University Prof., RI/CS tk@cs.cmu.edu
Hua Zhong PhD Student, CS hzhong@andrew.cmu.edu

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.


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