Weill Cornell's XR catheter tracking is 5x faster than 2D for cardiac procedures

Despite advances in 3D ultrasound, most percutaneous cardiac interventions still rely on 2D visualization, which limits depth perception and spatial awareness. To address this, Mohsen Annabestani and colleagues at Weill Cornell Medicine developed an Extended Reality (XR) platform that provides real-time six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) catheter tracking within a patient-specific 3D heart model. The system fuses a custom machine-vision algorithm for 5-DOF tracking with a 3D-printed electromechanical encoder that measures catheter roll, enabling complete 6-DOF motion reconstruction. This allows clinicians to see the catheter's exact position and orientation in immersive 3D space, rather than inferring depth from flat 2D fluoroscopy or ultrasound images.

In a proof-of-concept study, 20 novice medical students navigated an intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) catheter to six anatomical targets using either the immersive 3D visualization or a conventional 2D cathlab-style view. The results were dramatic: participants in the 3D condition completed the task in an average of 54.6 seconds while traveling 1,939 mm, compared to 267.5 seconds and 7,854 mm in the 2D condition—a more than 5x improvement in speed and roughly 5x less catheter travel. The 3D mode also improved targeting precision and reduced performance variability between users. Participants rated the immersive visualization higher for accuracy, speed, usability, and clinical value. Kinematic analysis revealed smoother depth-axis navigation in 3D, whereas 2D users relied on repeated corrective movements. These findings suggest that XR-based visualization could substantially improve procedural training efficiency, precision, and motor control in cardiac interventions.