Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Current medicine makes use of various minimally invasive surgery methods such as endoscopy and catheterization. These techniques represent a tremendous progress from traditional medicine, but many enhancements still remain possible. The insertion of such devices is usually made manually par a surgeon navigating in a complex artery network. Only easy access regions can be reached to avoid damages for healthy tissues and blood vessels. The objective of this project is to improve these interventional techniques by guiding of magnetic catheters using a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. The magnetic fields present inside the MRI would modify the trajectory of the magnetic catheter tip in any given direction of space. The direction could be chosen in order to follow the path of an artery or to fork at a certain junction. The use of a software platform would allow pre-operation programming of the catheter course inside the arteries of the patient and then trajectory follow-up through the surgery process. Our goal is consequently to develop and install the software and hardware material necessary to the automatic guidance and tracking of magnetic catheters and to extend the range of functionalities offered by clinical MRI currently used in hospitals. The consequences of the success of such a project would have a tremendous impact on the medical field and on surgical treatment administered. This project would represent a worldwide step forward in the computer assisted surgery domain.