According to the American Heart Association, the cardiac disease accounts for over 800,000 deaths every year (1 of every 3 deaths) in the US alone. Mitral regurgitation, which occurs in 2% of the population, has become the dominant valvular disease contributing to the high death rate caused by cardiac disease. The existing percutaneous treatments of mitral regurgitation suffer from compression of left circumflex artery, limiting their performance and causing serious iatrogenic consequences. Moreover, they are not tunable resulting in limited functionality. In this thesis, a catheter-based tunable device is designed to be implanted inside the coronary sinus for improving mitral regurgitation grade while minimizing the applied force on the left circumflex artery. A comprehensive computed tomography scan image analysis and experiments are performed to extract the required information for the design of the device and its evaluation with FEM simulations. A new effective engagement mechanism for integrating the device with the steerable catheter is designed and tested through large-scale experiments.
Additionally, a temperature insensitive force/torque sensor is designed for guiding and introducing the device. This sensor can also be used in other catheter-based devices such as cardiac ablation catheters. The sensing structure of the sensor and its sensing method are evaluated by FEM simulations and large-scale prototyping. The actual-scale prototype of the sensor is fabricated, and the experiments are performed for analyzing the static and dynamic response of the sensor and its temperature cross-sensitivity.
Left circumflex artery aneurysm with fistula to coronary sinus associated with severe mitral regurgitation
