Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

CURATIVE

• Title: CompUteR-based simulAtion Tool for mItral Valve rEpair

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Harvard University (United States) - Harvard Biorobotics Lab (HBL)- Robert Howe

• Start year: 2017

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/curative/

• The mitral valve of the heart ensures one-way flow of oxygenated blood from the left atrium to the left ventricle. However, many pathologies damage the valve anatomy producing undesired backflow, or regurgitation, decreasing cardiac efficiency and potentially leading to heart failure if left untreated. Such cases could be treated by surgical repair of the valve. However, it is technically difficult and outcomes are highly dependent upon the experience of the surgeon.

  One way to facilitate the repair is to simulate the mechanical behavior of the pathological valve with subject-specific data. Our main goal is to provide surgeons with a tool to study solutions of mitral valve repairs. This tool would be a computer-based model that can simulate a potential surgical repair procedure in order to evaluate its success. The surgeons would be able to customize the simulation to a patient and to a technique of valve repair. Our methodology will realistically simulate valve closure based on segmentation methods faithful enough to capture subject-specific anatomy and based on a biomechanical model that can accurately model the range of properties exhibited by pathological valves.

• Pierre-Frédéric Villard is a co-investigator in the INVIVE project (http://www.it.uu.se/research/scientific_computing/project/rbf/biomech) funded by the Swedish Research Council and realized within a collaboration with Uppsala University and Karolinska Institute. Within this project, he is the co-supervisor of Igor Tominec (Uppsala University) with Elisabeth Larsson (Uppsala University) as the main advisor.

• Gabriele Steidl (Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany) invited Fabien Pierre during two days in her team to work on convolution on Riemannian manifolds for color images. The goal of this collaboration is the design of a CNN to process images which values are on a Manifolds.