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Personalized 4D Virtual Catheter (vCath)

Personalized 4D Virtual Catheter

 

Invasive diagnostic Catheterization (Cath) remains the gold standard for hemodynamic assessment in several cardiovascular and neurovascular diseases for clinical decision making (e.g. disease severity, suitability for surgery, follow-up of disease progression or treatment/intervention success). Nevertheless, hemodynamic evaluation by Cath is not applicable to all patients due to its invasive nature. Furthermore, invasive Cath does not provide information on regional blood flow or flow patterns and hemodynamics. Previous in vivo and computational studies have provided evidence of the critical role of regional hemodynamic alterations on cardiovascular and neurovascular disease development. Several imaging modalities and computational tools (MRI, Doppler Echo, CFD-assisted CT, patient-specific CFD) can measure or provide noninvasive blood flow velocities but no approach is available that provide intuitive quantification or visualization of blood flow in a manner similar to the invasive Cath that is most familiar to clinicians. This invention address this unmet need via a method for generating a virtual Catheter (vCath) that uses mathematical modeling to mimic the well-established invasive catheter in probing hemodynamics but from any noninvasive modality or computational flow modeling that provide flow information. The vCath does not only enable noninvasive quantification of conventional Cath-derived hemodynamics but further enables flexible quantitative mapping and visualization of different regional hemodynamic metrics that can be derived from the velocity field (e.g. kinetic energy, energy loss, flow patterns, helicity, vorticity) and allows a high degree of automation. We have initially applied this technique to enable personalized qunatificationt and mapping of aortic blood flow from 4D Flow MRI. Here we aim to continue developing our novel concept of the 4D virtual catheter (vCath) technique for a personalized noninvasive assessment of advanced (in vivo) hemodynamics  to various cardiovascular and neurovascular compartments throughout the human body (e.g. heart chambers, great arteries, cerebral vessels or arteries in the brain) and other modalities or patient-specific models that provide data on flow velocities. 

Related Publications
  1. Mohammed S.M. Elbaz, Michael B. Scott, Alex J Barker, Patrick McCarthy, Chris Malaisrie, Jeremy D Collins, Robert O. Bonow, James Carr, Michael Markl. “Four-dimensional virtual Catheter: noninvasive assessment of intra-aortic hemodynamics in bicuspid aortic valve disease”. Radiology 2019
  2. Elbaz MSM, Scott MB, Barker AJ, Ryan Avery McCarthy P, Malaisrie C, , Bonow RO, Carr J and Markl M. 4D virtual catheter (vCath) assessment of intra-aortic hemodynamics in aortic valve disease: A study in 431 patients and controls”, Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR) 23rd Scientific Meeting , Orlando, Florida, February 12-15, 2020
  3. Mohammed S.M. Elbaz, Michael B. Scott, Alex J Barker, Patrick McCarthy, Chris Malaisrie, Jeremy D Collins, Robert O. Bonow, James Carr, Michael Markl. “4D Flow vCath: A novel virtual catheter technique for assessing hemodynamics in aortic valve disease”. Oral in SCMR 2019 (Oral). Early Career Award Finalist +  Travel Award
  4. Elbaz MSM, Scott MB, Barker AJ, McCarthy P, Malaisrie C, Collins JD, Carr J and Markl M. 4D Flow vCath: 3D Virtual Catheter for Volumetric Time-varying Aortic Hemodynamic Analysis from 4D Flow MRI. Proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the Society of Magnetic Resonance Angiography (SMRA), 28th-31st August, Glasgow, Scotland. 2018. Travel Award
Patents
  1. Patent-pending: application# 62/760,011: Mohammed S.M. Elbaz, Michael Markl “Noninvasive Quantitative Flow Mapping Using a Virtual Catheter Volume”.
Funding
  • 2-year American heart Association postdoctoral fellowship Award #19POST34380379      (PI: Elbaz)             (01/01/2019-12/31/2020)–Resigned on 07/01/2019  (Transitioned to faculty)             Project: “4D Flow vCath: virtual Catheter for Assessing Hemodynamics in Bicuspid Aortic Valve”.
Awards
  •  Early Career Award Finalist, Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR) 22nd Scientific meeting, February 6 – 9, 2019, Bellevue, USA (2019) for the abstract titled:“4D Flow vCath: A novel virtual catheter technique for assessing hemodynamics in aortic valve disease”.
  • Travel Award, SCMR 2019 conference