MICCAI 2019 Wednesday

MICCAI 2019 DAILY 14 Alon Baram is a PhD student in the biomedical image processing lab at Tel Aviv University, while also working for Biosense Webster. He speaks to us ahead of his oral and poster session today. The work Alon is presenting is a sparse ultrasonic array that is able to map the entire endocardial that the catheter is inside at a single heartbeat. Currently, arrhythmias affect millions of people worldwide and a part of the treatment is using a minimally invasive catheter ablation to destroy the tissue that is causing the heart to go into an arrhythmia. This procedure needs both the anatomical mapping of the chamber , and the electrical and physiological activity of this anatomy. Alon tells us his work is focused on the first challenge, the anatomy mapping, and by doing it in a single heartbeat, it will be able to track the tissue in real time. This will reduce the navigation that the surgeon has to do during an operation and will enable the second stage which is calculating the electrical propagation over it in real time as well. The surgeon here is an electrophysiologist whose job it is to solve arrhythmias in the heart by either ablating the tissue, or if it's bradycardia, by fitting a pacemaker. What are the challenges of this work? He explains: “The challenges are that the tissue is affected by the patient’s pose, their breathing and their heartbeat, which means that the CT that you took yesterday looks very different to what their heart is currently now. Being inside the chamber itself, it’s much easier to find out its anatomy than from the outside. We developed a new imaging technique. By using a wide- beam array, we tried to find out where the blood pool ends and the tissue begins by looking at the free space.” This new set of tools will enable better understanding of even non- stationary arrhythmias which are unable to be mapped properly today, such as atrial fibrillations , as they occur in real time. It will also shorten the procedure time for the surgeon. If you’d like to learn more about this work, come along to Alon’s oral today at 10:40 and his poster session [W-9-E-446] at 15:30. A Sparsely Distributed Intra-cardial Ultrasonic Array for Real-time Endocardial Mapping Presentation - Alon Baram