PhD position: Device design for endovascular interventions assistance

Main topics

Computer-Assisted Medical Interventions (CAMI) ; image processing ; interventional techniques ; omnidirectional cameras

Laboratory and research team involved

ISIT (Image Science for Interventional Techniques), http://isit.u-clermont1.fr/
CaVITI (CArdio-Vascular Interventional Therapy and Imaging), http://isit.u-clermont1.fr/en/team/CaVITI

Place, duration & salary

IUT Le Puy-en-Velay (43), France, for 36 months, starting October 2015, 1st , paid 2500€/month with charges, i.e. approximately 1500€ without charges.

Supervisors

·      Jonathan Courbon (contact for this PhD), ISIT,

·      Christophe Lohou, ISIT

Context & motivation

Cardiovascular diseases remain a main cause of mortality in industrial and developing countries. Among them, our team deals with aortic valve  stenosis. It is a symptomatic severe disease  that affect more than 4 % of North American and Europeans more than 75 years old [Carabello] and which prevalence rose with age [Osnabrugge].  The prognosis gets severe for the short-term while functional symptoms appear.

Image-guided therapies become more and more the treatment of choice to replace classical open surgery and reducing morbidity-mortality. Thus valve prostheses implanted with minimally invasive techniques have been developped.

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation has been developed for the treatment of patients with severe symptomatic aortic stenosis who have an unacceptably high estimated surgical risk. Indications of TAVI are specified in the consensus document [Kappetein] and will be extended to intermediate surgical risk patients in 2016.

The subject of this thesis is the design of an innovative device to assist endovascular interventions. This thesis will take place in the ISIT ISIT (Image Science for Interventional Techniques ;  Unité Mixte de Recherche 6284 UdA-CNRS ; Clermont-Ferrand, France) with the axe 2 of the team CaVITI (Cardio-Vascular Interventional Therapy and Imaging) in collaboration to praticians of the C.H.U de Clermont-Ferrand. It will be supervised by Christophe Lohou and Jonathan Courbon (assistant teacher). Experimentations will occur in the hybrid operating room called IMABLOC in the C.H.U de Clermont-Ferrand.

Thesis goals

The main objective of the thesis is the development of an assistance device based on an omnidirectionnal camera. Different features have to be studied : 1) medical imaging device pose estimation without constrast agent injection and without exposition radiation for its (re) positionning, 2) respiratory motion estimation to feed non-rigid registration algorithms and 3) device set-up with calibration and positionning assistance of the device.

Thesis organisation

The first year will be dedicated to make a state-of-the-art of medical devices with a focus on endovascular intervention assistance topic, and then to the design of a wide field-of-view camera-based device (pose estimation algorithms, assistance system for C-Arm positionning). The second year will deal with the development of methods to set-up the device. During the third year, the PhD student will work on respiratory motion estimation using the data provided by he device and its integration to overlap peri-operatory data taking into account respiratory motions.

Required skills

Besides knowledge on image/signal processing, mathematics topics and robotics the PhD student should have good practice of C/C++. He/She will work with the ITK/VTK libraries.

Application

The candidates should send their candidatures via email at , including: (1) their CVs, (2) motivation letter, (3) transcripts of previous university degrees, (4) previous research publications (if existing) and (5) contact information of 2 or 3 people who could serve as references. Candidatures should be sent before August 31th 2015.