Nowadays, minimally invasive procedures for the treatment of vascular diseases in the brain offer many advantages over open vascular surgery. In addition to shorter healing and rehabilitation times, they also have a lower mortality rate in many cases.
In minimally invasive procedures, a catheter is inserted into the human vascular system along a guide wire in order to open a vascular occlusion at the appropriate point in the event of an ischemic stroke, for example, or to widen a vessel in the event of a stenosis (narrowing of the vessel). One challenge for doctors is navigating the catheter to the desired location in the patient's vascular system. Innovative computer assistance systems can visualize the position of the catheter in the vascular system and thus help with the precise and safe placement of the instruments. Research into these computer assistance systems requires a vascular model (phantom) that enables the simulation of such neurovascular interventions.
At Ulm University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Dr. Alfred M. Franz's working group is currently conducting research in the field of navigation for medical interventions. A flexible, neurovascular vascular phantom has been developed.
What is special about the project is that the vascular phantom can only be created using freely available software and freely accessible data and that all construction instructions and test results have been published. This enables other researchers not only to recreate the phantom (inexpensively), but also to build on the research results and create other individual phantoms.
Source: THU
