A Virtual Catheter for Non-Invasive Mapping and Quantifiction of Blood Flow Patterns

NU 2018-127

Inventors

Michael Markl *

Mohammed S.M.M Elbaz

Short Description

A non-invasive medical diagnostic tool for visualizing local and global blood flow patterns.

Background

Seventy-five years since its initial discovery, cardiac catheterization remains the gold standard for the diagnosis of several cardiovascular diseases. Dignostic catheterization involves introducing catheters into veins and/or arteries in the neck, leg, or arm. Once inserted the cathether is advanced to the target site such as heart chamber or blood vessel from where blood pressure can be monitored. Beyond initial diagnosis, catheterization is also a valuable tool for follow up assessments of treatment efficacy and for evaluating disease severity. However, as a diagnostic tool, catherization remains limited to patients willing and able to undergo the invasive procedure, thus excluding severly ill patients and patients with pre-existing complications such as haemophilia.

Abstract

Northwestern researchers have developed an innovative first-in-class noninvasive blood flow and mapping virtual cathether (vCath). Although several noninvasive imaging tools currently exist for measuring blood flow velocities, there is presently no noninvasive approach that provides the rich details obtainable from invasive diagnostic cathethers, such as quantitative measurements of blood flow pattern. The current technology leverages mathematical modeling to noninvasively mimic the invasive catheter in probing blood flow patterns using data from noninvasive modalities and computational blood flow modeling. In addition to mimicking the quantitative capabilities of traditional invasive catheters, vCath enables quantitative mapping and visualization of different regional and global blood flow patterns and metrics such as pressure gradients, kinetic energy, energy loss, flow patterns. Although initially applied to quantifying and visualizing aortic blood flow from 4D Flow MRI, the vCath technology can be easily extended to other cardiovascular or neurovascular compartments throughout the human body with data acquired from complementary noninvasive modalities.

Applications

• Intuituive, noninvasive visualization and quantification of regional and global blood flow dynamics

Advantages

• Enables visualization of in-vivo blood flow data acquired by different techniques such as 4D flow MRI, Doppler echo, etc
• Expands access to patients previously exluded from invasive procedures
• Generates invasive catheter-like hemodynamic quantification from any noninvasive imaging modality
• Enables flexible quantification of multiple standard and novel hemodynamics metrics

IP Status

A provisional application has been filed.