Project Title: Electroanatomical mapping catheter with fiber optic sensors

Project Duration: May 21 – July 28 2018 (10 weeks), 40 hours per week.

Project Mentors:

• Primary Faculty Mentor (Name, Affiliation, website and Email/Phone):

Dr. Mable Fok, Associate Professor, College of Engineering

http://wave.engr.uga.edu/

Email: mfok@uga.edu

• Graduate Student/PostDoc mentors (Name, Affiliation and Email/Phone):

Qidi Liu, PhD student

Email: Qidi.Liu@uga.edu

Project Description:

Electroanatomical mapping is a nascent technology used frequently in electrophysiological procedures that treat cardiac arrhythmias. These procedures involve creating a 3D map of the heart (Fig. 1a) that incorporates electrical signal referred to as electrograms. This information is then used to guide radiofrequency (RF) ablation, which aims to disrupt abnormal impulse formation, conduction and propagation. However, the accuracy of mapping strongly depends upon whether the catheter is actually in contact with the tissue. Incorporation of “floating” electrograms, data points in which the catheter is not in contact with cardiac tissue, can dramatically alter the map, often times with deleterious consequences. Our objective is to integrate distributed fiber optic sensors into a clinical cardiac mapping catheter for monitoring electrode-tissue contact during mapping and RF ablation. The catheter will provide electrode-tissue contact information that has never been obtained before, as well as unprecedented mapping accuracy for guiding RF ablation.

Grace Jeanpierre, REU 2017 student, was working on this project. In 2018, we will change our focus into the development of distributed sensor instead of high-density sensor.

REU Student Role and Responsibility:

The REU student will be designing and integrating distributed fiber optics sensors into a variable-radius spiral-mapping catheter for monitoring electrode-tissue contact.

Based on our experience in fiber optics based sensor, the student will design an optical fiber with distributed fiber sensors and integrate it into the variable radius multipole spiral-mapping catheter. The fiber sensors enable contact sensing at each electrode. Since optical fiber is immune to electromagnetic wave, the fiber sensors will not negatively affect the atrial electroanatomical mapping or the RF ablation.

Required skills or courses for the REU student:

Experience in experiment data collection and data processing using excel.

Expected Outcome for REU student:

The student’s work will contribute to the research group’s publications, aimed for submission as a conference paper and journal paper in the area. Upon completion of the entire project, a comprehensive paper on the device will be submitted for journal publication. The device may also be in consideration for commercialization pending experimental outcomes.