Clinical Research Directory

The Efemoral Vascular Scaffold System (EVSS) for the Treatment of Patients With Symptomatic Peripheral Vascular Disease From Stenosis or Occlusion of the Femoropopliteal Artery

To evaluate the safety and performance of the EVSS in patients with symptomatic peripheral vascular disease from stenosis or occlusion of the femoropopliteal artery

The Impact of Optical Coherence Tomography on the Endovascular Treatment Planning of Femoropopliteal Disease

Rationale: Peripheral arterial disease is a severe clinical problem with an increasing prevalence, due to an ageing population. Endovascular treatment, usually using stents, is recommended for most lesions in the femoropopliteal tract. The patency of these stents is influenced by several factors, including stent sizing and stent positioning. Current procedural planning of femoropopliteal disease is primarily based on single-plane digital subtraction angiographies (DSA). This modality provides a 2-dimensional image of the vessel lumen, which may be suboptimal for stent sizing. It can therefore be difficult to choose the optimal stent position as minor lesions may be missed. Suboptimal treatment could result in unfavourable levels of wall shear stress causing the vessel wall to be more susceptible to neo-intimal hyperplasia ultimately causing restenosis and stent failure. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (OCT) is able to visualize the arterial wall with a micrometer resolution, which could result in better stent sizing. Furthermore, OCT is able to visualize different layers in the vessel wall and identify unhealthy areas, which may lead to a more optimal stent placement as unhealthy areas can be covered completely. Moreover, OCT provides detailed patient-specific geometries necessary to develop reliable computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models that simulate blood flow in stented arteries and calculate wall shear stresses, which could predict stent patency. Objective: To investigate in a clinical study how often the use of intravascular optical coherence tomography for femoropopliteal stenotic lesions leads to alterations in treatment planning before and after stent placement, in comparison to traditional digital subtraction angiography-based treatment planning. Study design: Exploratory observational study. Study population: 25 patients with femoropopliteal stenotic lesions who are treated with a Supera interwoven nitinol stent or Absolute nitinol stent. Main study parameters/endpoints: The percentage of procedures in which OCT changed the DSA-based treatment planning before and after stent placement to investigate the impact of OCT imaging on treatment planning.

Histological Segmentation of the Superficial Femoral Artery From Microscan to CT Using Artificial Intelligence

The femoropopliteal artery segment (FPAS) is one of the longest arteries in the human body, undergoing torsion, compression, flexion and extension due to lower limb movements. Endovascular surgery is considered to be the treatment of choice for the peripheral arterial disease, the results of which depend on the physiological forces on the arterial wall, the anatomy of the vessels and the characteristics of the lesions being treated. The atheromatous disease includes, in a simple way, 3 categories of plaques: calcified, fibrous, and lipidic. The study of these plaques and their differentiation in imaging and histology in the FPAS has already been the subject of research. To treat them, there are angioplasty balloons and stents with different designs and components, with different mechanical properties and different impregnated molecules. There is no non-invasive method (imaging) to accurately differentiate lesions along the FPAS. The analysis is performed from the preoperative CT scan, but there are high-resolution scanners that allow a quasi-histological analysis of the tissue. This microscanner can be used ex vivo. In the framework of a project, the learning algorithm was be créated (Convolutional Neural Networks) to automatically segment microscanner slices: after taking FPAS from amputated limbs, we correlated ex-vivo microscanner images of the arteries with their histology. The correlation was then performed manually between the microscanner images, and the histological sections obtained. the algorithm well be trained on these slices and validated its performance. The validation of the CT and microscanner concordance was the subject of scientific publications.

FRAMED Infrainguinal Venous Bypass Versus Conventional Autologous Bypass Trial

The purpose of this clinical trial is to analyze patency after autologous infrainguinal bypass surgery in patients receiving a venous conduit versus a covered venous conduit.