Innovating the Pulmonary Artery Catheter to Catch Thrombus - Entrepreneurial Track

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a serious and often fatal event in the perioperative period in patients undergoing major surgery. While patients may receive anticoagulation to prevent PE, many surgical patients are not candidates for anticoagulation due to risk of bleeding. There is a clinical need to design an intracardiac device that can be placed in the right atrium of the heart. Such device should have the feature of abilities to catch blood clots without hindrance of blood flow in the cardiac chamber. The conception of this device is born out of the current use of a pulmonary catheter; such catheter is introduced into the heart via an introducer catheter. Such catheter has its tip sit in the pulmonary arterial trunk and can be placed inside the heart with minimal risk of arrythmia, prothrombic state or bleeding. Such device is typically only left in the heart for the duration of need; and quite often, this duration may range from a few days up to a couple weeks (as long as there is no signs of infection). The main goal of this project is to revise the design of the current PA catheter in such a way that the catheter can be placed for the perioperative period in patients who are at high-risk for showering clots perioperatively. Such device can be life-saving. This is an illustration of what a PA catheter looks like

The design of this new catheter aimed to catch thrombus would likely to be shorter with its tip fan out slightly as to be able to mechanically catch thrombotic clots (maybe resemble a small umbrella). The catheter should sit in the right atrium. The anatomy of the heart is demonstrated in the following illustration:

Project Mentor: Engineering Mentor: James Hu, Medical Student, School of Medicine, UC Irvine, hujb1@hs.uci.edu Physician Mentor: Jody Chou, MD, Department of Cardiothoracic Anethesiology, UC Irvine, cjchou@uci.edu

Team: