Integrating fiber optic shape sensing in catheters enables navigation and position tracking to improve accuracy and repeatability of medical treatments.

Although there have been improvements made in the precision of the positioning of medical instruments by using fluoroscopy, there are still open questions and the need for further improvements. Being the flagship company in this technology FBGS keeps researching and investing to offer its customers state-of-the-art accuracy.

Fiber optic shape sensing has been in many papers proven to be a very good candidate to enable additional navigation and position tracking features for medical instruments and robots.

Different applications mean different challenges for the fiber like twist compensation, calibration and parameter optimization which will impact the sought accuracy.

Therefore, FBGS invests into R&D to overcome them. PhD student Omar Al-Ahmad discusses some of their aspects in his recent paper. His results meet the highest precision ever achieved for complex geometrical shapes and at a fix fiber length. His experiments also show a very reliable measurement with a mean spatial error in the sub mm range.

Read the whole paper:
Improved FBG-Based Shape Sensing Methods for Vascular Catheterization Treatment
Author: Omar Al-Ahmad
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9120340