Ablation power control based on contact force

摘要

Methods and systems are adapted for ablation of target tissue in a living subject by predicting a lesion size that would result from placing an ablation electrode into contact with the target tissue at a particular contact force while applying energy at a given power level for a particular time interval. The prediction involves modeling the lesion size as a non-linear function of the contact force, the power level and the time interval. The prediction may be iterated by varying the contact force, the power level or the time interval until a saturation point is found, beyond which the lesion size does not increase. After it is established that one of the iterations predicts a desired lesion size, ablation of the target tissue may be conducted using the contact force, the power level and the time interval of the one iteration.