Miniaturized antennas for microwave ablation of cardiac arrhythmias

This paper presents two novel antenna-based catheters for efficient delivery of microwave energy for ablation of arrhythmia causing cardiac tissues. A slot array antenna fed by a coaxial line is developed to create deep, thin and linear lesion for the cure of atrial fibrillation. Further, a single element bent wire monopole antenna to create large deep isolated lesions for the cure of ventricular tachycardia is also presented. Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) and Finite Element (FE) methods are used to optimise the performance of the antennas based on their reflection coefficients and near-electric-fields. Phantom and in vivo animal experiments at 2.45 GHz show that the lesions created using these two antennas are superior in both width and depth as compare to the reported microwave ablation antennas and radio frequency electrodes