I-Corps: A novel catheter for interventional cardiology

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a catheter that will reduce surgery time, and thereby reduce the physicians’ and patients’ radiation exposure, and improve their long-term health. Over one million procedures to treat cardiovascular diseases, the leading causes of death and disability, are performed annually in the United States. Given these procedures' life-threatening and time-sensitive nature, there is intense pressure to reduce the procedure time and increase cardiac catheterization lab operational efficiency to expand patient access. Currently, physicians spend between 30 minutes to 4 hours on a patient, depending on the complexity of the cardiovascular procedure. Existing catheterization tools offer limited dexterity and control when navigating patient anatomy, forcing physicians to work with multiple catheters and guidewires of different shapes and sizes. These devices also lack distal tip control making it stressful to predict catheter response while navigating them inside a patient's vascular tree.This I-Corps project is based on the development of a novel metamaterial-based catheter that easily navigates through challenging anatomies and, unlike existing solutions, works on a beating heart. The invention involves the development of new metamaterial structures leading to material and structural behavior that would improve catheter navigation through tortuous patient anatomies, with physicians having absolute control over catheter behavior in surgeries on beating hearts. With this technology, physicians can dynamically alter the distal tip stiffness and lock catheter shapes, which is impossible with any existing solutions on the market. These metamaterial properties remove the need for using multiple catheters of different shapes and sizes for a single surgery leading to a better surgical procedure. This innovation has the potential to advance the field of interventional cardiology by removing procedural redundancies leading to higher efficacy and conception of novel catheter-based surgeries for diseases where patients are rejected for specific surgeries either due to complicated anatomies or lack of better surgical tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.