Petroleum researchers at UiS and IRIS have spent decades developing flow models, and these are now tested on blood veins.

Images showing arteries
When adapting the model, Hiorth and Vinningland start with an image from a CT scan showing the patient’s heart and the blood vessels of the coronary arteries. The three dimensional geometry of the vessels is obtained by extracting the internal geometry of the arteries as accurate as possible from the CT images. The model calculates velocity and pressure in the blood vessels, and predicts how vessel narrowings limit the blood supply. The result is a three dimensional image showing pressure and velocity .
At the start of the project, Siemens Healthcare provided the researchers with the necessary geometry. In the future, the researchers plan to use their own methods, developed at UiS and IRIS.

The goal is a software that efficiently and accurately determines the severity of vessel narrowings using only non-invasive methods. This will allow doctors to determine the best treatment, for instance whether stenting is necessary to widen a narrow artery.

Better treatment in the future
“The new method is particularly useful when doctors face borderline cases. In some cases, with a minor blockage, the patient can have a good life without medical treatment. In cases of doubt, the method can give us information regarding pressure and flow. This makes it easier to make the right decision,” says Bogale.

The method is not yet fully developed, but the potential for the patient is huge, believes Bogale.

“If we succeed in adopting the method, it could have a preventive effect. In the future we might be able to quickly examine people and give advice on how they can change their diet or lifestyle, or give them preventive drugs to avoid heart attack”.

Commercial solution
Vinningland points out that non-invasive characterization of stenosis severity is a very active area of research, and similar methods are being developed by researchers worldwide. As an example, HeartFlow in California offers a commercial service where hospitals can upload CT-images and get calculated flow values in return.

“However, building a local competence on computation-based health research enable us to bring knowledge gained over decades of oil related research to new areas of healthcare in close collaboration with local hospitals and patients," Vinningland says.

"This region has a long tradition in collaborating with industry to solve practical issues which has given us an advantage in providing commercial solutions," Hiorth adds.

Back to HCB News

Cardiology Homepage