Implementation and Evaluation of a Protection Circuit and an Interface in an Experimental Setup for the Creation of Ablation Lesions on living Cardiac Tissue

  • Motivation
    Many cardiac arrhythmias, like atrial fibrillation, can be treated by radiofrequency catheter ablation (RFA). Up to the present time, no reliable criteria exist to assess complex ablation lesion geometries, e.g. linear lesions. Therefore, a robust and reliable criterion is required to assess lesion formation and to increase the success of the treatment. In the past decades exper-imental studies with living cells, patches or whole hearts have been intensively performed for investigating the electrophysiological properties of cardiac tissue. At the Institute of Biomedi-cal Engineering an in-vitro setup was established measuring the electrical activity of vital car-diac preparations under defined conditions by using fluorescence-optical and electrical tech-niques.

    Tasks
    In the current project it is planned to enhance this experimental setup for studying the electro-physiological characteristics of cardiac tissue surrounding an acute ablation lesion. The aim of this master thesis is to establish a radiofrequency ablation procedure for creation of ablation lesions under reproducible conditions. In a first step an electrical generator has to be integrat-ed in the experimental setup. Both the electrical device and the RFA have to be controlled via Software. Furthermore, this work will focus on the implementation of a protection circuit for the electrical measurement system, which acquires the electrical activity of cardiac tissue.