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		Design and Construction of a Device for the Guided Ablative Therapy of Cardiac Arrhythmias Maya Barley Dr. Richard Cohen Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
		Radio-frequency ablation treatment of cardiac arrhythmias involves the guidance of an ablation catheter to the site of the arrhythmia and the administration of a high-intensity radio-frequency current to the tissue. This technique suffers from a number of drawbacks. Locating the site of the arrhythmia is a trial and error procedure, and may require many hours during which the arrhythmia is ongoing. Patients for whom this length of time is prohibitive are excluded, as are those with more complex arrhythmias; the latter group has been estimated at 90% of patients. Furthermore, the technique is only successful in 71% to 76% of the cases to which it is applied. An inverse algorithm that allows arrhythmic sources to be identified and located from body surface ECG signals, with greater accuracy and in much less time, has recently been developed (Armoundas, MIT PhD thesis, 1999). I propose to design, build, and test a medically-safe device that performs the following functions: 1) measure body-surface ECG potentials and estimate the locations of arrhythmic sources using Armoundas' algorithm; 2) provide a graphical interface that will allow the surgeon to select and manipulate specific ECG data and view heart-dipole and catheter locations in virtual 3-D space; 3) deliver ablating currents to the site of the arrhythmia with a custom designed catheter. This device will allow cardio-electrophysiologists to deliver ablating currents much more precisely and more quickly than is currently possible and reach a wider group of patients.
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(last modified 3/12/03)