I-Corps: Single Chip Intravascular and Intracardiac Ultrasound Imaging Systems

冠心病是美国主要的死亡原因之一，仅在美国就有约6000万人患有某种形式的心脏病。因此，非常需要先进的设备和程序来诊断、治疗和纠正各种形式的心脏病。射频消融以纠正心律失常、完全阻塞的动脉重新开放和经导管瓣膜置换术等过程由于心血管系统内导管诊断和治疗设备的指导困难而延长，有时无法成功执行。这个i-Corps团队开发了一种微型前视3-D超声成像系统，它基本上为心脏病专家或外科医生提供了一个手电筒，让他们在血管系统和心脏内导航。开发这项技术是为了解决复杂介入心脏手术的图像引导方面尚未满足的需求。该发明的设备提供了发生在心脏结构内的有意义的实时解剖信息，以及冠状动脉和周围静脉和动脉的三维视图。该设备应该允许经验较少的临床医生能够在更短的时间内以类似的准确性获得与非常熟练的外科医生相同的结果。它还应该允许某些基于导管的微创手术，如由于现有设备的限制而被拒绝的闭塞动脉的再通，现在可以进行，避免心脏直视手术。从长远来看，这项技术有可能以更低的成本提供同等或更好的性能，从而完全取代目前基于导管的超声成像系统，因为它将极大地减少组装和导管布线，这是主要的成本驱动因素。

Coronary heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the US and some 60M people in the US alone have some form of heart disease. Therefore, a great need exists for the advancement of devices and procedures to diagnose, treat, and correct a wide variety of forms of heart disease. Procedures such as radio frequency (RF) ablation to correct arrhythmias, reopening of totally blocked arteries and trans-catheter valve replacement are prolonged and sometimes not successfully performed due to the difficulties in the guidance of catheter based diagnostic and therapeutic devices within the cardiovascular system. This I-Corps team has developed a miniature forward looking 3-D ultrasound imaging system which essentially provides a flashlight for cardiologist or surgeons to navigate through the vascular system and within the heart. The proposed technology is developed to address the unmet need in image guidance for complex interventional heart procedures.The device that invented provides meaningful, real-time anatomical information occurring within the structures of the heart, as well as coronary and peripheral veins and arteries in a three dimensional view. The device should allow a less practiced clinician the ability to achieve the same results as a very skilled surgeon in less time and with similar accuracy. It should also allow certain catheter based minimally invasive procedures such as recanalization of blocked arteries which were declined because of the limitations of present devices, to now be done and avoid the open heart surgery. In the long term, the technology has the potential to displace the current catheter based ultrasound imaging systems completely by providing equal or better performance at reduced cost since it will dramatically reduce the assembly and catheter cabling which are the main cost drivers.