A device for stent designing in emodynamic surgery room

Abstract

Quantitative angiography has becoming largely used in interventional cardiology mainly because of its positive impact in terms of patients survival indexes and life quality. Such a tecnique is performed with a laparoscopic procedure and cures coronary stenoses with the installation of a medical stent. Benefits from the treatment are immediately perceived by patients. Furthermore laparoscopy avoids the potential problems related to the complexity of an open-heart surgery procedure. Stent positioning is guided by using contrast liquid and angiographic X-Rays images. The operator looks at angiographic images to estimate the dimensions of the stent to be installed.With the described procedure physicians may have difficulties in optimally estimating the stenosis size in order to choose the most appropriate stent because they have no absolute reference on the angiographer screens. In this paper we present an innovative device able to assist the physician's pre-implant analysis and thus supporting him for an optimal stent choice.