Prof. Ali Tavallaei of Ryerson University

Minimally invasive revascularization of arterial occlusions, involves the use of thin, long, and flexible devices known as guidewires. The guidewires are percutaneously introduced to the vessel lumen and remotely manipulated from outside the body under x-ray fluoroscopy image guidance. The guidewire is navigated towards the occlusion within the artery and is then used to cross it. Once the occlusion is crossed, the guidewire acts as a guiding path for a balloon catheter, and possibly a stent, which allows opening the occlusion and restoring normal blood flow.  Despite a large number of minimally invasive revascularization procedures performed (>3 million annually worldwide), a large portion of these procedures, unfortunately, fail for technical reasons (20% failure rate for chronic total occlusions).  This presentation discusses the morphology of arterial occlusions, characterized by MRI and CT, as well as the physics of guidewire navigation and steering and derives a conclusion on what appears to be the underlying cause for the failure of many such minimally invasive procedures. A novel image-guided navigation platform, aimed at addressing these limitations in revascularization, and potentially many other catheter-based cardiovascular interventions is presented along with initial verification results and validation data.

Biography:

Dr. Tavallaei is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Systems and Devices for Cardiovascular Interventions and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Ryerson University. He performed his Ph.D. studies at the Robarts research institute at Western University (graduated in 2015). In parallel to his Ph.D. studies, he co-founded and led Vital Biomedical Technologies, a spinoff from Robarts that commercialized the world’s first quality assessment motion phantom for MRI and MRI-guided therapy. After his Ph.D. studies, he completed the Medical Device Innovation Fellowship Program, a joint program between the University of Minnesota and Western. Then he joined Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) as a postdoctoral fellow. During his postdoctoral fellowship at SRI, Dr. Tavallaei co-founded Magellan Biomedical. His technology transfer efforts at Magellan Biomedical and his academic research at Ryerson, and Sunnybrook, focus on improving image-guided minimally invasive interventions and particularly cardiovascular interventions.