Overview

ARTreat targets at providing a patient-specific computational model of the cardiovascular system, used to improve the quality of prediction for the atherosclerosis progression and propagation into life-threatening events that need to be treated accordingly.

ARTreat will provide a three-level patient model describing the 3d arterial tree anatomy, the patient-specific blood flow and blood particle dynamics and the biological processes that lead to the creation and progression of atherosclerotic plaques.

ARTreat will apply the developed patient-specific model on two main applications: the clinical decision support and the training. ARTreat will produce two decision support tools to assist clinical cardiologists into providing personalized treatment selection and real-time, on- the-fly advice during invasive interventions, such as stent positioning. The aim is to minimize future therapy costs, by providing higher than ever possible personalized treatment support. The same patient-specific model will also be used to develop a real-case simulator training, which will support realistic hands-on skill development training to clinical cardiologists.

Finally, ARTreat is coupled with advanced clinical support tools for plaque characterization, and the discovery of new knowledge; associations among heterogeneous data, that can improve the predictive power of the patient-model. It thus supports the medical expert into programming the accumulated knowledge into the existing model and generating an adaptive patient-specific computational tool.

Members of the ARTreat consortium include organisations which are among the European leading companies for products and services in the areas of (i) medical IT and (ii) cardiovascular and arterial surgery. Those companies will exploit the ARTreat applications to provide new sophisticated solutions to their product range, while all academic and IT company partners will accumulate significant experience on the new generation patient-specific healthcare service.

CSB contribution

Within ARTreat CSB contributes to the design and development of an advanced state-of-the-art tool for prevention and diagnosis of atherosclerosis. CSB undertook the responsibility for the development of the 3D reconstruction of the arterial tree from CT and MRI image slices. CSB also contributes to the design of a haptic interface for the training of stent-positioning.

EU Funding