Unique set-up for training of CTO intervention and evaluation of new catheter technologies with haptic feedback

Recanalization of chronic total occlusions of coronary vessels is a wide-spread catheter intervention with proven bene-fit for the patient. However, it incorporates a certain risk of penetrating the vessel as well as increasing patient’s expo-sure to radiation and contrast agent with longer procedural time. As with many medical applications, the physician’s expertise is a key to successful interventions. In this work, we present a specially designed model circuit, which provides CTO-training for interventional cardiologists. As a test scenario, a silicone model of a coronary vessel is modified to ex-hibit comparable haptic properties of a CTO with and without microchannels. Expert evaluation in the development phase will ensure a realistic haptic impression of the model. Extending the state-of-the-art, a special guide wire from the HapCath project with a diameter of 0.014 inch and an integrated force sensor at the tip can measure the intracorporal forces of the intervention. Additionally, a modified torquer with an integrated single-axis force sensor is used to meas-ure the forces executed by the cardiologist during the test procedure. The movement of the guide wire is measured by an encoder in order to assess movement-based quality criteria. A camera setup with software filtering is used to obtain an x-ray-like image of the training scenario that can be used with a human-machine-interface similar to a real operat-ing setup. Applied x-ray and contrast agent doses can be measured as well. Thus, a new training and evaluation setting for CTO training with haptic feedback will be developed to optimize training in interventional cardiology and to evalu-ate new technologies for the interventional treatment of these challenging scenarios. The setup will also help to evalu-ate whether haptic facilitates the CTO-intervention