Engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS in Bremen, Germany have developed a technology that allows a catheter to understand how it is bent, which can indicate precisely where it is along its journey.
The capability, made possible thanks to fiber optics outfitted with microscopic mirrors, works by detecting color changes as the fiber is bent.
All this is coupled with software that creates a 3D model of the vasculature through which the catheter will travel, gathered from CT and MRI scans. As the catheter travels through a patient who was scanned prior to the procedure, the system can match the real-time shape of the catheter to the shape of the vessel within the 3D model, identifying the location of the catheter in the vessel.
This so-called IntelliCath (Intelligent Catheter Navigation) system is yet to be tried on humans or animals, but has been shown to have a 5 mm accuracy when using silicone tubing.
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