Due to the collaborative efforts of professors N.C. State and Duke University, the medical world will soon see a new and improved version of heart catheters.

A normal human heart works mainly due to the electromagnetic impulses that run throughout it. There are many reasons why hearts malfunction. Sometimes, certain cells in the heart create their own impulses and cause disturbances, according to Gregory Buckner, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and one of the chief engineers in this project.

“This can be thought as analogous to a couple of members in a band going out of order. Even if it is just the two of them, it is sure to cause disturbance amongst others,” Buckner said.

This condition is known as atrial fibrillation and may cause heart problems to certain individuals due to lack of oxygen supply.

“Pharmaceuticals and drugs are available to arrest these sudden impulses, but they may not always work very well. The patients may have intermittent or long chronic complaints of atrial fibrillation,” Buckner said.

The Cox Maze procedure is currently used to treat this type of ailments.  A catheter which is manually maneuverable is moved through the heart to reach defective areas, mainly near the pulmonary vein.  According to Buckner, the catheter tube can only move in two directions and a lot of skill is needed in order to use it.

“First of all, it is an open heart surgery,” Buckner said.  “Risks are involved in it.”

Another complication of the surgery is due to the length of the surgery. The patient and the doctors are exposed to long durations of X-ray radiation.

According to Buckner, the main function of the device the professors are proposing remains the same, to cut down or scar the defective cells. However, the new part in it is that it will be computer controlled.

“The doctor just needs to feed the input parameters to the software in terms of some specific points and then command the computer to finish the circle. The computer then traces the path and cures the defective tissue,” Buckner said.

There are companies that have commercialized their own robotic catheter designs, but these require multi-million dollar capital investments and customized catheter laboratories.

“We are working with some of the manufacturers of catheters to commercialize the product in near future,” Buckner said. “The price of our product is expected to be competitive with the already available manual heart catheter in the market.”

The main advantage of Buckner’s proposed robotic catheter is that it will reduce surgery time.

The robotic catheter uses of “shake memory alloys,” also known as “smart materials,” as the main probe with six to eight segments that make up the rest of the probe. This material contracts when heated and expands when cooled, allowing it to bend and rotate in any direction by regulating the amount of current flowing through the segments.

Salim Idriss, assistant professor of pediatrics, cardiology and biomedical engineering from Duke University, is one of the team members for the robotic heart catheter.

“I feel that this collaboration between Duke and N.C. State University is a great one. My role as a human physiologist in this project is to provide essential translation between the engineering and clinical aspects of it,” Idriss said.

The research team also includes College of Veterinary Medicine faculty members Bruce Keene, clinical sciences professor, and Guillaume Chanoit, clinical assistant professor.

“It is a two-year project. Our next aim is to do trial experiments on pig hearts in early 2011, as they closely resemble to the human heart. With further refinements in the design, we expect it to be ready for the market sometime in 2012,” Buckner said.