Cardiovascular catheter with an expandable origami structure

Interventional catheter ablation treatment is a noninvasiveapproach for normalizing heart rhythm in patients with arrhythmia.Catheter ablation can be assisted with magnetic resonanceimaging (MRI) to provide high-contrast images of the heart vasculaturefor diagnostic and intraprocedural purposes. TypicalMRI images are captured using surface imaging coils that areexternal to the tissue being imaged. The image quality and thescanning time required for producing an image are directly correlatedto the distance between the tissue being imaged and theimaging coil. The objective of this work is to minimize the spatialdistance between the target tissue and the imaging coil by placingthe imaging coil directly inside the heart using an expandable origamicatheter structure. In this study, geometrical analysis is utilizedto optimize the size and shape of the origami structure andMRI scans are taken to confirm the MRI compatibility of the structure.The origami expandable mechanism could also be applied toother medical device designs that require expandable structures.