CathVision: a smoother look at cardiac electrograms

10th July 2017

CathVision

Enaie Azambuja

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CathVision aims to reduce noisy electrogram signals during cardiac arrhythmia ablation procedures. With cleaner signals, cardiologists can better locate the areas that generate arrhythmias and ablate them. For example, with a higher signal-to-noise ratio, cardiologists can have higher confidence when probing the low-voltage areas of the heart. This is important because cardiac arrhythmias, which affect 2% of the world, remain an untreatable challenge in about 50% of ablation procedures.

Patients with cardiac arrhythmias have issues with conductance of the heart. In some cases, the wiring of the heart can short-circuit, causing circular conduction loops that fire and contract parts of the heart earlier than expected, throwing the entire heart out of rhythm.

In other cases, aberrant tissue can generate random, uncoordinated beats, which also throw the heart out of rhythm. Either way, the condition can cause turbulent blood flow that then causes blood clots that get lodged in the brain, potentially causing stroke.

Cardiac ablation is a treatment that works by either destroying the short circuitry or the aberrant generation center to restore normal heart conduction and beating. But for this to be effective, the doctors have to find the source of the problem.

Often, they search for late potentials in scar-based arrhythmias, which are not visible through the noise of many existing systems. Also, mapping of atrial fibrillation is difficult due to the small signals generated from the atria. Cue CathVision.

The CathVision Cube is a 20x20x20 cm signal processing box that aims to simplify locating diseased tissue and works with all diagnostic, mapping, and ablating catheters on the market today. It acts as a middle attachment that plugs into a procedure room’s existing medical equipment for rapid setup and use.

It translates the signals from the catheters to monitors in the room and can direct RF signals for ablation when the diseased tissue has been found. Importantly, it reduces the noise of the detection signal and facilitates interpretation of where diseased tissue is.

CathVision has announced receiving several million dollars in venture capital funding from VF Ventures and Borean Innovation to prepare clinical testing in humans and prepare for regulatory approval. The company has conducted two years of animal testing and currently expects to obtain CE Mark in 2018.