Anser EMT – the first open-source electromagnetic tracking platform for image-guided interventions

Electromagnetic tracking is the gold standard for instrument tracking and navigation in the clinical setting without line of sight. Whilst clinical platforms exist for interventional bronchoscopy and neurosurgical navigation, the limited flexibility and high costs of electromagnetic tracking (EMT) systems for research investigations mitigate against a better understanding of the technology’s characterisation and limitations. The Anser project provides an open-source implementation for EMT with particular application to image-guided interventions.

This work provides implementation schematics a EMT system which relies on low-cost acquisition and demodulation techniques using both National Instruments and Arduino hardware alongside MATLAB support code.