Project Description:

Rural patients are less likely to survive a heart attack than their urban counterparts. Over 80% of rural communities lack access to doctors who can perform life-saving stenting procedures, leaving patients an average of 90 miles from the nearest interventional cardiologist. Traditional stent deployment procedures that utilize balloon expandable stents rely on manual indeflators and require on-site doctors specializing in interventional procedures. In collaboration with Emory University and Dr. Zachary Bercu, we developed the Robotic Assisted Indeflator (RAI), an innovative, tele-interventional platform that enables stent deployment procedures to be done remotely by a physician in a different geographical location. Although heart attacks were the initial focus of this work, the system has broad potential for incorporation with stenting procedures that treat other vascular conditions. The RAI integrates an FDA-approved balloon indeflator (Boston Scientific Encore 26) with its robotic system. At the patient’s location, a stepper motor controls the pressure through gears coupled to the rotational piston of the indeflator. An incorporated pressure transducer allows live pressure monitoring. At the physician’s location, a graphical user interface (GUI) allows doctors to inflate and deflate the balloon while monitoring live X-rays and pressure data. The GUI has embedded software safety controls and warning messages to ensure safe inflation. The RAI showed success during comprehensive testing of balloon inflation capabilities and pressure transducer accuracy. The system was validated with Dr. Bercu, who used the RAI to successfully deploy stents into an ex vivo pig heart and fully-occluded coronary artery models. This testing confirmed the functionality and compatibility of the device with existing clinical workflows. Our system is the first of its kind and enables urban physicians to remotely perform procedures on rural patients, ensuring they receive safe, timely, and advanced endovascular care. With the RAI, distance no longer decides who survives a heart attack.