Experimental Validation of the Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model of the MRI-Actuated Catheter

An MRI-actuated catheter is a novel robotic catheter system that utilizes the MRI for both remote steering and visualization for catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation. Planning and control of the catheter requires a sufficiently fast yet accurate model of the catheter. The pseudo-rigid-body (PRB) model offers a reasonable trade-off between speed and accuracy by approximating the continuum catheter as rigid links connected by flexible joints, thus reducing the infinite degrees of freedom of the continuum mechanism to a finite one. In this paper, a PRB model of the MRI-actuated catheter is validated experimentally by comparing the deflections of the PRB model with the deflections of the catheter prototype.