ARTS: A Paradigm Shift in Cardiac Interventions

Cardiac ablation procedures are considered as the gold standard procedure for treating patients to prevent them from deadly cardiac arrythmias resulting from previous heart attacks. With current state-of-the-art management, an increasing portion of patients survive an acute heart attack, but unfortunately, they often suffer from long-term sequelae of the infarction.

In the post-infarction heart, scar tissue is formed, and it can contain “slow conducting channels” which represent the substrate for such potentially deadly arrhythmias. Novel cardiac MRI-based techniques show potential to detect these “slow conducting channels.”

Therefore, as the first step to successfully manage post-infarction patients, it is crucial to detect and visualize these complex scar structures in 3-dimensional space to identify those post-infarction patients at risk for sudden cardiac death in order to perform an accurate cardiac ablation procedure to eliminate the “slow conducting channels”.

The 3D heart model generated by HeARTS can be used by ARTSim, the simulation tool to plan and prepare for the MRI-guided cardiac ablation procedure.

Given the complexity of maneuvering a catheter inside the heart chambers, ARTSim gives the opportunity to plan and simulate the procedure many times before performing it on a patient.

Using ARTSim, the interventionalist will replicate the same experience including the real time visualization of the catheter maneuvers within the patient’s virtual hearts. To enable this, ADIS has developed cutting-edge augmented reality software to track the physical catheter and display its movement inside the virtual heart in 3 dimensions.

The ARTS platform also allows to train young interventionalists on individual hearts of real patients so to prepare them for MR-guided ablation procedures.
With ARTS platform, ADIS is introducing a new paradigm in cardiac interventions.