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

冠心病是导致美国人死亡的主要原因之一，仅在美国就有大约6000万人患有某种形式的心脏病。因此，迫切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。诸如射频（RF）消融术纠正心律失常、重新开放完全阻塞的动脉和经导管瓣膜置换术等手术都需要延长时间，有时由于导管诊断和治疗设备在心血管系统内的指导困难而无法成功实施。这个I-Corps团队开发了一种微型前视3d超声成像系统，它本质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部进行导航。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。发明的设备提供有意义的，实时解剖信息发生在心脏的结构，以及冠状动脉和外周静脉和动脉的三维视图。该设备应该允许不太熟练的临床医生在更短的时间内取得与非常熟练的外科医生相同的结果，并且具有相似的准确性。它还应该允许某些基于导管的微创手术，如阻塞动脉的再通，因为现有设备的局限性而被拒绝，现在可以做，避免心内手术。从长远来看，该技术有可能完全取代目前基于导管的超声成像系统，以更低的成本提供相同或更好的性能，因为它将大大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.