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

冠心病是美国的主要死因之一，仅在美国就有6000万人患有某种形式的心脏病。因此，非常需要改进用于诊断、治疗和矫正各种形式的心脏病的装置和程序。诸如射频（RF）消融以纠正心律失常、完全阻塞的动脉的重新开放和经导管瓣膜置换的手术被延长，并且有时由于在心血管系统内基于导管的诊断和治疗装置的引导方面的困难而不能成功地执行。这个I-Corps团队开发了一种微型前瞻性3D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，可以在血管系统和心脏内导航。所提出的技术是为了解决复杂介入心脏手术中图像引导的未满足需求而开发的，所发明的设备提供了在心脏结构内以及冠状动脉和外周静脉和动脉的三维视图中发生的有意义的实时解剖信息。该器械应允许不太熟练的临床医生能够在更短的时间内获得与非常熟练的外科医生相同的结果，并具有相似的精度。它还应该允许某些基于导管的微创手术，例如由于目前设备的限制而被拒绝的阻塞动脉的再通，现在可以完成并避免心脏直视手术。从长远来看，该技术有可能通过以降低的成本提供相等或更好的性能来完全取代当前基于导管的超声成像系统，因为它将显著减少作为主要成本驱动因素的组件和导管布线。

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.