Interventional Centre partner in new European Commission FP7 Project: SCATh

The Smart Catheterization (SCATh) project is a spin-off from the Marie Curie project ARISER that The Interventional Centre coordinated from 2004 to 2008. The SCATh-project was initiated by one of the ARISER partners (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) by Jos Vander Sloten and Mauro Sette. The Interventional Centre is as a partner responsible for the development of catheter tracking/navigation in MR and clinical application and relevance. From The Interventional Centre Ole Jakob Elle will coordinate the IVC participation, with Frederic Courivaud responsible for the MR technology, Per Kristian for radiological aspects and Jacob Bergsland responsible for cardiac applications. IVS will be funded by 54 person months and given a total budget of approximately 3,7 mill NOK over four years by the project.

Modern medicine is irreversibly shifting towards less invasive surgical procedures. Conventional open surgery approaches are systematically being replaced by interventions that reduce access trauma and thereby minimise pain and hospitalisation periods for patients. The downside of this approach is that it is highly demanding for the interventionalist, entailing unacceptable risks for the patient. In the perspective of patient safety, SCATh aims at minimizing these drawbacks specifically for a series of new and promising catheterization procedures. These procedures have the common denominator of dealing with cardiovascular disease, the main cause of death in the EU. SCATh will provide the interventionalist with visual and haptic tools for robust and accurate catheter
guidance, which will be developed through novel approaches, by fusing preoperative patient-specific anatomical and mechanical models and intra-operative data streams from in situ sensors. By complementing and augmenting the skills of the interventionalist, patient safety will drastically increase and at the same time, potentially life-threatening complications which result from poor or damaging (xray,use of contrast agents) visualisation or poor surgical technique can be avoided.
The new concept for tracking, sensing, modelling and manipulation of the surgical environment will be integrated with existing technological state-of-the-art in close cooperation with clinical experts and industrial partners, both in the design and in the evaluation phases. The common efforts delivered during this project will result in a demonstrator applied to a carefully selected set of catheter procedures. Moreover, many of the technological advancements created during SCATh touch upon minimally invasive surgical procedures in general.
The main objective of SCATh is therefore:
The creation of an ICT platform that closes the existing gap between the reality of the catheter inside the cardiovascular system and the manner in which this reality is presented and made accessible to the interventionalist.
Among the main advantages of the envisioned approach are:

1. Better, more detailed real-time information of the catheter and its local environment.
2. Reduced mental load on the interventionalist.
3. Improved manoeuvrability of the catheter and control by the interventionalist.
4. Faster observation (2) of adverse events and better response (2,3) to such events.
5. Reduced dependency on visualisation techniques that are harmful for the patient and/or the
interventionalist or that put large stress upon the health care system in terms of expenditure.

Partners are:
1 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven KUL Belgium
2 Centro Investigation Biomedico En Red GBT-UPM Spain
3 The Interventional Centre, Oslo University Hospital IVS Norway
4 Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW Switzerland
5 Imperial College London ICL United Kingdom
6 Technische Universitat Graz, Institut fur Biomechanik TUG Austria
7 Endosense EndoS Switzerland
8 AngioCam GmbH AngioC Germany