Development of an in-vitro patient-specific diagnostic simulator for vascular diseases and their interventions

预计到2030年，心血管疾病仍将是全球死亡的主要原因。在加拿大，每四人死亡中就有一人死于心血管疾病，心血管疾病每年给加拿大经济造成的损失超过220亿美元。因为心血管疾病的患病率随着年龄的增长而增加，随着加拿大人口的老龄化，心血管疾病对加拿大经济的负面影响将越来越大。诊断是心血管疾病费用的一个重要且重复的因素。在本项目中，开发了一种快速的低成本心血管疾病诊断计算工具。这个项目确实挽救了加拿大人的生命，创造了就业机会，并为加拿大带来了经济增长。该项目能够开发：(1)用于低成本心血管疾病诊断的快速计算工具；(2)对患者无风险的临床干预计划的预测工具。该工具将在对身体进行不可逆转的手术之前预测干预方案对每位患者心血管系统功能的影响。这种预测工具在全球范围内需求量很大，可以指导个性化干预措施；（三）法规规定的医疗器械检测机。这台机器可以通过在体外执行许多重要的体内评估程序来满足医疗器械公司的测试需求，并将大大减少对动物研究和人体试验的需求，因此它可以大大加快设备审批过程，缩短新医疗器械的上市时间和上市成本。因此，这台机器将增加加拿大在医疗器械市场上的份额，因为这些器械的制造商需要在将其医疗器械投放市场之前进行监管设计和耐久性测试以获得批准。

Cardiovascular disease is expected to remain the leading cause of death by 2030 globally. In Canada, one in every four deaths is a result of cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease costs the Canadian economy more than $22 billion annually. Because the prevalence of cardiovascular disease increases with age, with the Canadian aging population, the negative impact of cardiovascular disease on the Canadian economy will increasingly grow. Diagnosis is a significant and repeated contributor to cardiovascular disease costs. In this project, a rapid computational tool for low-cost cardiovascular disease diagnosis is developed.This project indeed saves Canadian lives, creates jobs, and brings economic growth to Canada. This project enables the development of: (1) a rapid computational tool for low-cost cardiovascular disease diagnosis; (2) a predictive tool for planning clinical interventions at no risk to the patients. The tool will predict the effects of intervention scenarios on the cardiovascular system's function of each patient before performing an irreversible procedure on the body. Such a predictive tool is in high demand worldwide to guide personalized interventions; (3) a regulatory medical-device testing machine. This machine can serve the testing needs of medical-device companies by making it possible to perform many important in vivo evaluation routines in vitro and will significantly reduce the need for animal studies and human trials so it can significantly speed up the device approval process and reduce the time-to-market and cost-to-market for new medical devices. This machine, therefore, will increase Canada's share in the medical devices market as the manufacturers of these devices need to perform regulatory design and durability tests to receive approvals before releasing their medical devices to the market.