I-Corps: A novel catheter for interventional cardiology

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是开发一种导管，它将减少手术时间，从而减少医生和患者的辐射暴露，并改善他们的长期健康。美国每年进行100多万例治疗心血管疾病的手术，心血管疾病是导致死亡和残疾的主要原因。鉴于这些手术具有生命危险和时间敏感的性质，因此有巨大的压力需要减少手术时间，提高心导管实验室的操作效率，以扩大患者的接触范围。目前，医生在患者身上花费的时间在30分钟到4小时之间，这取决于心血管手术的复杂程度。现有的插管工具在导航患者解剖时提供了有限的灵活性和可控性，迫使医生使用不同形状和大小的多个导管和导丝。这些设备也缺乏末端控制，这使得在患者血管树内导航时预测导管反应变得有压力。这个i-Corps项目基于一种新型超材料导管的开发，这种导管可以轻松地在具有挑战性的解剖结构中导航，而且与现有的解决方案不同，它适用于跳动的心脏。本发明涉及开发新的超材料结构，导致材料和结构行为，这将改善导管在曲折的患者解剖中的导航，医生可以绝对控制心脏跳动手术中的导管行为。有了这项技术，医生可以动态改变末端末端的硬度和锁定导管的形状，这是市场上任何现有解决方案都不可能做到的。这些超材料特性消除了在一次手术中使用不同形状和大小的多个导管的需要，从而产生了更好的手术程序。这一创新有可能通过消除程序冗余而推动介入心脏病学领域的发展，从而为患者因复杂的解剖结构或缺乏更好的手术工具而拒绝接受特定手术的疾病带来更高的效率和新的基于导管的手术的概念。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.