Team: Alicia Auduong, Shaurya Dhingra, Andrew Hu, Roshan Toopal

Client: Steven Hetts, MD, Associate Professor in Residence of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, UCSF

Problem: In clinical medicine, endovascular therapy—the treatment of cardiovascular disease from inside the blood vessel—has changed the way heart attacks, stroke, and other cardiovascular conditions are being treated. Catheterization even aids targeted delivery of chemotherapeutics. Such delivery reduces patient side effects and improves treatment efficacy. The chemofiltration devices can also extract chemotherapeutics from the bloodstream, preventing toxic drugs from leaving the tumor site. While promising, accurately seating the catheter in the endovascular system is a non-trivial and error prone procedure.

Need: Our unmet need centers on devising a means to make endovascular catheters visible for both MRI and X-ray guided interventions, in an effort to improve safety outcomes.