The strongFeasibilitystrong of Using Thermal Strain Imaging to Regulate.pdfVIP

1406 IEEE TransacTIons on UlTrasonIcs, FErroElEcTrIcs, and FrEqUEncy conTrol , vol. 58, no. 7, jUly 2011 The Feasibility of Using Thermal Strain Imaging to Regulate Energy Delivery During Intracardiac Radio-Frequency Ablation chi Hyung seo, Member, IEEE, douglas n. stephens, Member, IEEE, jonathan cannata, Member, IEEE, aaron dentinger, Member, IEEE, Feng lin, Member, IEEE, suhyun Park, douglas Wildes, Senior Member, IEEE, Kai E. Thomenius, Member, IEEE, Peter chen, Tho nguyen, alan de la rama, jong seob jeong, Member, IEEE, aman Mahajan, Kalyanam shivkumar, amin nikoozadeh, Student Member, IEEE, omer oralkan, Senior Member, IEEE, Uyen Truong, david j. sahn, Pierre T. Khuri-yakub, Fellow, IEEE, and Matthew o’donnell, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—A method is introduced to monitor cardiac abla- nostic tool to a potent prophylactic and curative method. tive therapy by examining slope changes in the thermal strain an exciting recent development is the increasing adoption curve caused by speed of sound variations with temperature. of catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation [6]. atrial fibril- The sound speed of water-bearing tissue such as cardiac muscle increases with temperature. However, at temperatures above lation is the most frequent arrhythmia in clinical practice about 50°C, there is no further increase in the sound speed and its incidence is increasing as the population ages [7]. and the temperature coefficient may become slightly negative. radio-frequency ablation (rFa) is used in electro- For ablation therapy, an irreversible injury to tissue and a physiology (EP) procedures to permanently alter the complete heart block occurs in the range of 48 to 50°C for myoc