Obtaining high accuracy measurements of medical stents from 2D X-ray images

牛津心跳(OxHB)是一家早期初创企业，开发创新技术，使心血管手术更有效率和效果。我们正在开发帮助外科医生计划和排练血管内微创支架放置的软件--这是目前最受欢迎的常见心血管疾病的治疗方法。该软件允许外科医生模拟不同支架如何在患者的解剖结构中安装和表现，并为每个患者选择最佳手术方案。该软件将安装在医院并用于手术准备，减少并发症的数量以及医院和社会的相关成本。在开发出用于脑内支架放置的最小可行产品后，下一阶段是验证我们模拟结果的准确性。由于我们是在外科领域内运作，因此该技术提供高度准确的结果以可靠地支持临床决策是至关重要的。因此，我们需要将模拟结果与实际临床结果进行比较。为了能够与我们的模拟进行比较，我们需要使用临床上可用的历史2D扫描来测量部署在患者体内的真实支架设备的配置--解决这个复杂的测量问题是这个项目的重点。在拟议的项目中，我们旨在开发和评估一种新的方法，用于从X射线血管成像捕获的患者大脑的2平面投影视图中获得准确测量脑血管内支架复杂3D形状的大小和位置的新方法。国家物理实验室(NPL)将提供精确测量和不确定性量化方面的专业知识。主要活动包括开发新的方法，通过使用扫描中存储的元数据将二维患者扫描的支架与术前解剖(在我们的软件中构建)对齐来测量支架的参考构型。我们将测试在合成模型中实现准确对齐和测量的潜在步骤，然后将其传输到真实的匿名临床图像，最后对主要变量进行不确定性分析。拟议的项目建立在成功完成的IUK智能市场证明(POM，2016)、生物医学催化剂可行性(BMC-F，2017)以及来自NIHR i4i Connect和SBRI Healthcare(2018)的资金的基础上。我们之前的项目成果获得了许多奖项，包括2017年NHS创新奖(HEE)。牛津心跳还被Medilink UK评为2017年度英国初创企业，并被《连线》评为2018年最佳医疗初创企业。

"Oxford Heartbeat (OxHB) is an early-stage start-up developing innovative technology to make cardiovascular surgeries more efficient and effective. We are building software that helps surgeons plan and rehearse minimally invasive stent placements inside blood vessels -- currently the most popular treatment for common cardiovascular disorders. The software allows surgeons to simulate how different stents will fit and behave in a patient's anatomy and select the best surgical scenario for every patient. The software will be installed in hospitals and used in surgery preparation, reducing the number of complications and the associated cost to hospitals and society.Having developed the minimal viable product for placements of cerebral stents in the brain, the next stage is to validate the accuracy of our simulated results. Since we are operating within the domain of surgery, it is paramount that the technology delivers highly accurate results to reliably support clinical decision-making. Therefore, we need to compare the results of our simulations with real clinical outcomes. To enable comparison to our simulations, we need to measure the configurations of real stent devices that have been deployed inside patients using clinically available historic 2D scans -- solving this complex measurement problem is the focus of this project.In the proposed project we aim to develop and evaluate a novel methodology for obtaining accurate measurements of the size and position of the complex 3D shape of stents inside brain blood vessels from the 2-plane projection view of the patient's brain captured by X-ray angiography. The expertise in accurate measurements and uncertainty quantifications will be provided by the National Physical Laboratory(NPL).The main activities include developing the new method for measuring the reference configuration of the stent from 2D patient scans by aligning them with preoperative anatomy (constructed in our software) using the metadata stored in the scans. We will test out potential steps to achieve accurate alignment and measurements in a synthetic model, then transfer it to real anonymised clinical images and, finally, perform uncertainty analysis for the main variables.The proposed project builds upon the successfully completed IUK SMART Proof of Market(PoM, 2016), Biomedical Catalyst Feasibility (BMC-F, 2017), as well as funding from NIHR i4i Connect and SBRI Healthcare (2018). The results of our previous projects have received numerous awards, including the NHS Innovation Award 2017(HEE). Oxford Heartbeat was also named the UK Start-up of 2017 at Medilink UK and the WIRED ""Best Healthcare Start-up of 2018."""