Passive Catheter Tracking with a Controllable Susceptibility Effect

William Dominguez-Viqueira¹, Hirad Karimi², Charles H. Cunningham¹, ²

Susceptibility artifactbased tracking using paramagnetic markers is been used for guiding endovascular interventions in MRI, but with limited enthusiasm partly because of the image degradation that results from such devices. Recently, a susceptibility-based tracking device which can be mechanically turned ON and OFF was proposed. In this work, the device was re-computed for a three-layer design with widely available materials, scaled down to 3mm (9F) diameter and attached to a catheter to show feasibility with real-time images. The difference between the aligned and miss-aligned configurations was large in the MRI images, showing the feasibility of tracking the device.