  Intra-cardiac Echocardiography (ICE) is a powerful imaging modality for
guiding electrophysiology and structural heart interventions. ICE provides
real-time observation of anatomy, catheters, and emergent complications.
However, this increased reliance on intraprocedural imaging creates a high
cognitive demand on physicians who can often serve as interventionalist and
imager. We present a robotic manipulator for ICE catheters to assist physicians
with imaging and serve as a platform for developing processes for procedural
automation. Herein, we introduce two application modules towards these goals:
(1) a view recovery process that allows physicians to save views during
intervention and automatically return with the push of a button and (2) a
data-driven approach to compensate kinematic model errors that result from
non-linear behaviors in catheter bending, providing more precise control of the
catheter tip. View recovery is validated by repeated catheter positioning in
cardiac phantom and animal experiments with position- and image-based analysis.
We present a simplified calibration approach for error compensation and verify
with complex rotation of the catheter in benchtop and phantom experiments under
varying realistic curvature conditions. Results support that a robotic
manipulator for ICE can provide an efficient and reproducible tool, potentially
reducing execution time and promoting greater utilization of ICE imaging.
