Company Concept
- Reducing intraoperative trial and error through preoperative simulation of endovascular treatment -
Our CEO has long been involved in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and other cardiovascular interventional treatments.
As a clinician, I have been thinking hard about ways to reduce trial and error during surgery, even if only as much as possible.
Currently, we are aiming to contribute to treatment by developing a program that will select the appropriate guiding catheter from cardiac CT scans for patients undergoing PCI treatment, thereby shortening treatment time and increasing the success rate.
story
The CEO was concerned about the current situation in which there is still no tool to help select guiding catheters in PCI, which leads to intraoperative problems and the frequent use of auxiliary devices, so he attempted a simulation using cardiac CT.
Initially, we used 3D CAD to faithfully reproduce the guiding catheter, but the simulation did not go well when integrating the 3D CAD with cardiac CT.
It was not possible to recreate an image of how the guiding catheter would be positioned and behave inside the aorta during surgery.
So we tried to incorporate cardiac CT and guiding catheter 3D data into Virtual Reality (VR),
The simulation involves manipulating and fitting a catheter within a virtual space.
We realized that it is only because we have actually performed PCI and have an image of it that we can perform a highly accurate simulation.
I have contributed to a variety of cases.
The process of creating polygon files from cardiac CT scans, which is a hurdle in VR simulation,
While we were trying to see if we could automate the process, we met with our CTO.
The development of SWORD AORTA, an application that uses AI to extract coronary arteries and aortas from cardiac CT scans and convert them into polygons,
It has accelerated simulations using VR and contributed to PCI after transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), endarterectomy for aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR), left atrial appendage closure (LAAC), and pediatric cardiovascular interventions.
However, VR has limitations in its versatility when used in daily clinical practice.
There was a need to develop a system that could contribute more to clinical practice.
Therefore, we analyzed the geometric algorithm of the simulation performed in VR,
We came up with a method to achieve this through AI simulation.
The company was launched in May 2023 to embark on application development.
Hirooki Higami
CEO
MD, Ph.D.
Fellow of the Japanese Association of Cardiovascular Intervention and Therapeutics (CVIT)
Fellow of the Japanese Society of Internal MedicineFellow of the Japanese Circulation Society (JCS)
Supervisory doctor of thoracic aortic endovascular repair (cTAG [GORE], Zenith TX series [COOK])
Supervisory doctor of abdominal aortic endovascular repair (Zenith AAA [COOK], Excluder [GORE], Endurant [Medtronic], and AFX [Endologix])
Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine (Kyoto University)
CTO
Kazuhiko Matsumoto
MS, Information Engineering, University of Tokyo
[Patents]
• Medical image processing apparatus and method: US patent 8311300
• Image processing method: US patent 8013856
• Image processing system for volume rendering: US patent 8004516
• Diffusion weighted image processing apparatus and recording medium for recording image
analysis program: US patent 7974451
• Image processing method and computer readable medium for image processing: US patent
7907763
• Changing the display angle of visualized tubular tissue: US patent 7873197
• Image processing method and computer readable medium for image processing: US patent
7860284
and others. More than 100 granted in total.
Company Overview
Company Name
AnrealTwin Inc.
Capital
18,000,000 yen
Date of Establishment
May 2, 2023
Business Contents
Development of simulation application for endovascular treatment
Medical device development consultation
Development of AI for intravascular imaging
Preoperative examination of difficult cases of endovascular treatment
Medical lectures, etc.