Together with the Clinic and Polyclinic for Neuroradiological Diagnostics and Intervention of the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), the COSY-SMILE-2 project is being worked on at the PKT, building on the results of the COSY-SMILE project.

Initial situation

Ischaemic stroke is one of the main factors leading to disability and death worldwide. The most common cause of acute stroke is an occlusion of a cerebral artery by a blood clot (thrombus), which leads to oxygen deprivation of a brain region and consequently to cerebral infarction. Reopening via a catheter-based treatment, the so-called thrombectomy, is the first-choice therapy. Under high time pressure, the goal is to open the affected vessel as quickly as possible. Special vascular pathologies become a particular challenge for the treating physician. In addition, life-threatening intracerebral bleedings can occur during treatment, which further complicates successful treatment implementation. Therefore, continuous training and confident control of treatment techniques, such as thrombectomy, is indispensable for the physician. A common training model for thrombectomy is the animal model in pigs. Due to the clinical establishment of thrombectomy as a treatment procedure since 2015, a high demand for training measures is to be expected. The neurointerventional Simulationmodell HANNES 2, which was developed in cooperation with the UKE, offers physicians an extensive alternative to the trainings performed on live animals.

Objective

Within the project COSY-SMILE-2, the Simulationmodell HANNES 2 will be extended to allow a wider range of training scenarios through more specific pathologies and norm variants as well as enabling new treatment procedures. This should make potentially necessary training and research activities on animals completely obsolete.

Approach

The extension of the Simulationmodell with further pathologies and norm variants will be based on original, anonymized patient data. For this purpose, the data will first be evaluated and post-processed so that they can ultimately be integrated as new variants into the modular blood vessel tree of HANNES 2. In addition, an increase in the degree of realism, for example by introducing further measurement technology into the model, will be made possible. The project benefits from a strong interdisciplinary collaboration of engineers of the TUHH and physicians of the UKE.