For catheter designers today, creating effective and minimally invasive medical devices is imperative. Whether for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes, engineers are looking to design catheters that can navigate complex and tortuous vasculatures deep inside the human body.

Steerable catheters offer a powerful solution to this challenge. With enhanced stability and increased control compared to non-steerable options, these devices facilitate intricate procedures by utilizing a series of pull wires running along a multi-lumen assembly to achieve expert manipulation of the distal tip.

Traditional methods of assembling steerable catheters are, however, challenging. Not only are operators required to load and manually stretch each lumen, but they must also attach the satellite lumens individually. At around 3 minutes per lumen, this gluing process is both tedious and time-consuming – not to mention error-prone.

Zeus PTFE Sub-Lite-Wall™ multi-lumen tubing helps streamline this process by providing a single extrusion consisting of one large central lumen with up to four smaller satellite lumens. This naturally delivers improved structural integrity, but moreover, with fewer manufacturing steps, it also significantly reduces assembly time.

To evaluate our multi-lumen tubing and illustrate just how much time it can save, we asked a catheter manufacturer to build a series of devices. They built 20 catheter shafts using traditional techniques, while another 20 were built using Zeus’ single, process-ready PTFE Sub-Lite-Wall™ multi-lumen tubing, recording assembly times for each step.

The results were impressive. On average, operators completed the loading, stretching, and bonding steps six times faster using the new multi-lumen technology compared to traditional methods. Interestingly, there was also less disparity between skilled and inexperienced operators resulting in significant cost savings, not just through reduced assembly time, but also thanks to reduced operator training requirements and increased yields.

With manufacturing improvements such as these, we aim to expedite advanced steerable catheter designs, helping device engineers ensure precise control and torque response to optimize clinician control and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

For a full breakdown of the catheter assembly test results, watch the video below: