Structural heart diseases will affect 20 million people over 65 in the European Union between now and 2040, of which 2.5 million in Italy. Aortic stenosis, mitral and tricuspid regurgitation are some examples of this diseases, which mainly affect with advancing age and which could soon become a social emergency. Currently they concern about 12.5% of Italians.
Among the research projects that deal with structural heart diseases there is also ARTERY (Autonomous Robotics for Transcatheter dEliveRy sYstems), a Horizon 2020 project that started last January, coordinated by Prof. Elena De Momi and Prof. Emiliano Votta of Politecnico di Milano’s Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria.
The project is focused on non-invasive treatment of heart valve diseases and aims to create a revolutionary robotic platform that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to develop new guidance and monitoring systems capable of training and supporting operators, making surgical interventions safer and more effective for the patient and eliminating the use of X-rays.
More specifically, ARTERY will introduce two major innovations that will have an important impact on cardiac operations: the remote control of robots through artificial intelligence and augmented reality - hence the ability to manage complex operations intuitively and, potentially, from a distance - and the use of sensorized catheters, which will allow more control and precision in the movements of the catheter inside the patient's body. These innovations will make percutaneous heart interventions easier to learn and perform, and safer for patients and practitioners.
The surgeon will be able to interface with the robotic system through augmented reality, select the target point that the catheter must reach and view the model of the catheter and the patient's vascular tree. The system will be semi-autonomous and decisions, guided by artificial intelligence, will always be shared and agreed with the human operator. In practice, an immersive and intuitive system will be created in which the operator will be responsible and in charge of the supervision while the cardiovascular procedure will be performed by a robot.
To achieve this ambitious goal, Politecnico di Milano cooperates with IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele, which provides clinical guidance in the development of the project, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa, which deals with the sensorization of the system, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, which deals with the robotic implementation of catheters, and three companies that will contribute to the translatability of the research: FBGS, specialized in fiber optic sensors, Artiness, specialized in augmented reality applied to the medical world, and Swissvortex, specialized in transcatheter technologies.