Pre-surgery planning in vascular procedures: an introduction to the RT3S Project

RT3S is an EU-funded project in an area of e-health – ICT for Patient Safety. Specifically, RT3S is developing a patient-centred, probabilistic model for peripheral stent fatigue-fracture, integrated within a real-time, computer-aided surgery planning application. RT3S will provide advice on fracture risk for individual combinations of patient anatomy and stent design. Alongside the pre-operational software tool, which is addressed mainly to interventional radiologists, RT3S has also developed a training application that will be of benefit to trainee vascular interventionists and engineers in medical device companies. This paper provides an overview of the work performed during nearly three years of project activities and also addresses the motivation leading to RT3S and the expected impact.