Sep 7, 2018

Improved treatment of common arterial calcification disease with intelligent catheters from Fraunhofer IPMS

Intelligent catheters equipped with Fraunhofer IPMS CMUT technology should offer more features, make things easier for doctors, and increase the safety of medical procedures.
Source: © Philips
Sep 7, 2018
Arteriosclerosis is the most common of all vascular diseases. The narrowing of arteries, restricting blood flow to organs and other body parts can lead to critical consequences of life-threatening heart attack or life-changing stroke. Patients diagnosed with arteriosclerosis must undergo surgery to expand narrowed or blocked blood vessels. This surgery consists of a physician inserting a catheter through a vein into the arterial vasculature to relieve harmful constriction using either a balloon or stent.

The majority of these surgeries can be performed using minimally invasive procedures supported by a variety of smart imaging and sensory catheters, allowing doctors to see exactly where a catheter is at any point during operative treatment.
 
In the recently launched “POSITION II” project aiming to further develop features of intelligent catheters, Fraunhofer IPMS strives to make procedures easier for doctors and safer for patients. The project aims to provide more functional medical instruments based on micromechanical ultrasonic transducers, making them smaller and cheaper as well as safer and easier to use.

Ultrasound transducers for medical imaging are currently based primarily on the piezoelectric effect for both signal generation and evaluation, using special, potentially-toxic piezo materials. These materials are also difficult to manufacture, making them very expensive. In implementing MEMS structures (so-called MUT components) for the construction of ultrasonic transducers, Fraunhofer IPMS technology sidesteps these important challenges to achieve a compact design and the associated higher miniaturization. Integration into CMOS processes using special technology (as a post-CMOS-module) provides for production cheaper than possible with piezo-based ultrasonic transducers. In addition, higher frequency can be achieved, resulting in better resolution allowing for more accurate analysis of medical imaging.

Further information on the joint project »POSITION-II« can be found at www.position-2.eu.

Contact: Romy Zschiedrich, Fraunhofer IPMS
info@ipms.fraunhofer.de


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