ARTreat is an EU-funded eHealth FP7 collaborative R&D project aiming at developing a multi-level, patient-specific computational model of the cardiovascular system for atherogenesis progression and propagation. Periodically ARTreat issues a newsletter to give information about the latest development in the project. You can now read the 5th issue.
ARTreat aims at producing a three-level modelling platform, which will assist cardiologists on accurately diagnosing atherosclerosis while providing them the possibility to predict the evolution of the disease.
This platform will be coupled with other medical applications, such as plaque characterization application, producing a unified software environment which will be easily incorporated in the clinical workflow.
More in details the project will develop and validate:
A patient-specific three-level model of the vasculature, integrating 3D arterial tree anatomy, blood flow and particle dynamics and the biological processes that lead to the formation and growth of atherosclerotic plaques.
Treatment Decision Support Tools for assisting cardiologists in selecting appropriate patient treatment and stent positioning during clinical interventions.
A virtual, highly realistic training environment for stent-positioning for interventional cardiologists.
Shortly the ARTreat project results will be publicly available to the scientific community via the ARTreat Models website (http://www.artreatmodels.eu -currently under construction) and through the VPH-NOE repository. A dedicated multipurpose model data management system will be created to store a range of data created within ARTreat in reusable or open source formats and annotated following the latest standards and VPH good practices.
Anonymized cases for each image modality (IVUS, MRI, CT coronary, CT carotid) will be selected from the ARTreat imagedatabase. For each one of them, image data and models derived from the ARTreat platform will be available in open XML-based formats for further use.
The publicly available models will be linked with the imaging data and will include both the 3D information: arterial geometry as splines, surfaces and meshes, plaque geometry, progression and characterization, visualized simulation results both from Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and the associated metadata.
More informationon this topic is available on the lastest newsletter issue.
For further informationyou can visit the ARTreat website or access the newsletter repository.
