Patent ID: 8412309

Claim:
A medical device guiding system comprising: a medical device having a built-in magnet and introduced into a body cavity; a position detecting device having a magnetic field generator and a magnetic field detector, one of the magnetic field generator and the magnetic field detector being incorporated in the medical device, wherein the magnetic field generator generates a first magnetic field of a specific frequency and the magnetic field detector detects magnetic-field information including the first magnetic field of the specific frequency, to detect at least one of a position and an orientation of the medical device; and a magnetic guiding device having a guiding coil that generates a guiding magnetic field for changing at least one of the position and the orientation of the medical device by acting on the magnet, and a drive unit connected to the guiding coil to supply power for generating the guiding magnetic field, wherein the position detecting device is arranged at a specific position detection area for estimating at least one of the position and the orientation of the medical device, and the position detecting device comprises: a look-up table that stores a plurality of pieces of numerical information having a correlation with a second magnetic field induced at a position of the magnetic field detector by at least one of the guiding coil and the magnetic field generator due to the action of the first magnetic field, when the medical device is arranged at a plurality of specific positions in a plurality of specific orientations; a magnetic field calculator that estimates, based on the position and the orientation of the medical device, the second magnetic field by referring to the look-up table; a magnetic-field extracting unit that calculates corrected magnetic-field information obtained by subtracting the second magnetic field estimated by the magnetic field calculator from the first magnetic field detected by the magnetic field detector; and a position calculator that estimates, based on the corrected magnetic-field information calculated by the magnetic field extracting unit, the position and the orientation of the medical device.