March 12, 2014 — For patients living in rural areas, life-saving procedures such as an angioplasty may only be available at a facility more than 200 miles away. To bridge this distance, Corindus Vascular Robotics is partnering with Sanford Health and The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to launch a feasibility study for a remote robotic systems cath lab telecardiology program.
Following the feasibility study, the remote robotics program is intended to potentially empower an interventional cardiologist at a major center to robotically control the movement of interventional devices at a remote facility. This could offer patients located in rural areas the high-quality heart care and treatment currently available only at heart centers in major metropolitan areas. The first phase of the program aims to understand what is required to make remote robotics successful. The development of the program will proceed based on those findings.
With funding from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Corindus and Sanford Health will pursue pioneering remote capabilities for robotic-assisted percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
CorPath is an U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared technology. It enables precise, robotic-assisted angioplasties to open arteries and restore blood flow in patients with coronary artery disease. Physicians sit in a lead-lined interventional cockpit protected from radiation exposure. CorPath allows the cardiologist to advance stents and guidewires millimeter-by-millimeter using joysticks and touchscreen controls. The remote robotics program is intended to extend the capability of CorPath to not just perform angioplasty in the same cath lab, but in labs hundreds of miles away.
For more information: www.corindus.com