Steerable Microcatheters

We have developed steerable catheters at a scale suitable for navigation into the brain. These devices must be less than 1mm in outer diameter, while maintaining a hollow lumen (~0.4mm) for passage of guidewirese and stent-retrieval devices. Although this actuation concept has been previously reported in the literature, my contribution on this work was in developing design and fabrication alternatives which enable the prototype to be made safe enough to traverse human blood vessels. I explored micromachining and laser-cutting approaches with metals (nitinol) and polymers (Pebax, nylon) (Abah et al., 2024).

As an example, below is a video of a steerable microcatheter navigating the tortuous aortic arch (of a phantom model). This navigation is performed without a guidewire or a support catheter, which would be required for standard, existing catheters.