Meshless Modelling for Heat-based Robotic Navigation of Radio Frequency Catheter Ablation

Radio frequency catheter ablation (RFCA) of cardiac arrhythmia is commonly performed by navigating the catheter manually. Nevertheless, remote navigation tech- niques where catheter steering is performed using either a magnetic field or robotically are available. Clinical ex- perience with these techniques demonstrated that higher contact forces can be achieved with robotic compared to magnetic field navigation [1]. This translates into more effective ablation lesions, but if excessive contact force is applied it may lead to higher risk of cardiac perforation [2]. However, the robotic navigation system is no longer commercially available and advancements have been stalled. To ensure high effectiveness and low complica- tion risk in next-gen robotic navigation systems, tissue heat distribution should be taken into account. Compu- tational models for heat distribution simulation predict lesion formation effectively [3]. However, their clinical application is limited since they have been developed for single-site ablation and numerical accuracy depends on the quality of mesh discretization. In this work, we propose a novel meshless model to simulate tissue heat distribution during robotic navigation assisted ablation. The model accounts for non-zero initial conditions and time dependent boundary conditions to simulate multi- site ablation. The meshless Fragile Points Method (FPM) is employed for the numerical solution of the model to ensure its suitability for clinical application, since FPM does not require the definition of a mesh [4], [5].