Medical Incentive – the Missing Tool

To date, no diagnostic tool is available on the market enabling the direct vision through blood with sufficiently high resolution. It is an old dream of cardiovascular surgeons as well as cardiologists to directly view vessel walls and cardiac structures from the inside. At the moment, the progress in interventional / minimally invasive surgery is slowed down due to a missing imaging tool. With this novel technical concept, our company puts this idea into practice to attain this goal of an videoendoscopic system enabling to guide minimally invasive cardiac operations such as mitral valve repair, closure of septal defects, or endovascular stenting of the severely diseased thoracic aorta, as well as several interventional procedures in interventional cardiology. Compared to IVUS technology, our system provides a better resolution to directly visualize the vascular wall structures within.

Application - Advantage and Benefit

This patented angioscope assists the cardiovascular surgeon in pre-operative, intra-operative and postoperative treatment of patients. The novel therapeutic tool enables a simple morphologic imaging of the cardio-vascular system with a huge field of application, e.g. during complex heart surgery. Thus, the operating room of the future will invariably have this tool as an integrated piece of the armamentarium promoting the further progress of minimally invasive cardiac surgery. In contrast to standard imaging methods, this smart system provides higher resolution without using ionising radiation. In the future, the cardiovascular angioscope stimulates new techniques of visualization aiming at real four-dimensional image processing. Experts from phlebology, accident surgery and fetal surgery are looking forward to applicating this tool.

Angiocam develops and sells a high resolution technology for vision through blood. This technology will be integrated into an intra-cardiac catheter in order to give a real-time inside view of the beating heart and the major blood vessels. This system can be used for minimally invasive cardiac surgery and for diagnoses of the cardiovascular system. For the proof of concept, a demonstrator of the system was built