Various locating systems have been used in the past to determine the position of an object such as the tip of an endoscope or a catheter within the human body
Systems and methods are known for determining the location of a catheter or endoscopic probe inserted into a selected body cavity of a patient undergoing a surgical procedure. For example, there exist systems that may use acoustics, optics, conductance and electromagnetics to locate or “localize” a medical instrument in an anatomical body. In an electromagnetic system, location data may be obtained from electrical measurements of voltage signals that are induced within a sensing coil affixed to the distal end of the catheter prove. A voltage is induced in the sensing coil in response to pre-specified electromagnetic fields that project into the anatomical region of interest which contains all prospective locations of the catheter probe. The electrical measurements of the induced signals may provide sufficient information to compute the angular orientation and the positional coordinates of a coil in a sensor, and hence the catheter probe, which collectively define the location of the coil.
Regardless of the technical particulars of a surgical localization system, each system typically includes a component internal to the patient associated with a medical device and a component external to the patient for calculating the position of the medical instrument.