Objectives
ARTERY intends to start a robotic revolution in structural heart surgery, paving the way to the scenario we envisage in ten years from now. SHD percutaneous treatments will be performed by autonomous robots, with minimal mental effort for the doctor; human-robot interaction will be intuitive, with maximum safety for both doctors and patients. These features will set a new gold standard in percutaneous treatment, offering a safe and reliable outcome and making open heart surgery a treatment of the past.
To achieve this objective, ARTERY will pursue six technological objectives:
- Design distinct sensing and actuation technology for a new generation of steerable catheters, featuring unprecedented levels of control and which are inherently safe in a fragile and dynamic environment.
- Establish a leap in RT3DTEE interpretability, radically improving the doctor’s awareness of the cardiac space by adding an extra layer of information about the patient’s anatomical details, which are automatically identified through a neural network.
- Enable doctors to interact intuitively with the intracardiac space and also define the intracardiac trajectories intuitively, using augmented reality.
- Enable precise autonomous navigation through an unstructured and dynamic environment, based on ad hoc control software and artificial intelligence.
- Eliminate intraprocedural X-ray imaging by utilizing real-time biomechanical imaging.
- Demonstrate the feasibility of a robotic implementation of SHD percutaneous treatment using currently available transcatheter technologies.
Funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, ARTERY is an initiative led at international level in 4 different countries: Italy, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. The 7 scientific and technical partners involved are: Politecnico di Milano (coordinator), in cooperation with Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Artiness, FBGS, IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital, KU Leuven, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, SwissVortex. The project will last 3 years, from January 2021 to September 2024.