CATHETER-BASED DEVICE FOR INTRA-CARDIAC
MITRAL VALVE CHORD MANIPULATION

PHYSICIAN:
Robert Levine, MD: Harvard Medical School

STUDENTS:
Will Boswort, Ani Mazumdar, Miguel Saez, and Alex Slocum, Jr.

MODERATOR:
Rajiv Gupta, MD: MGH

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INTRODUCTION:

With the goal of engaging graduate students and accelerating ideas into prototypes, teams of MIT graduate students in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering spend a semester collaborating with clinicians in CIMIT-affiliated hospitals to develop innovative medical devices. Clinicians (physicians, nurses, and scientists) present clinical problems and initial ideas on how they might be solved. Students form teams to work with the clinicians to turn these ideas into reality. The goal is for the students to deliver a working prototype and a journal-quality article in one semester. The course has been a great opportunity for clinicians to test out new ideas and to stimulate new collaborations. For example, Robopsy, a robotic device to assist radiologists performing tumor biopsies was invented by an MIT team led by Rajiv Gupta, MD, in 2004. The team has been awarded the 2007 MIT $100K prize, the world's leading entrepreneurship competition.

SUMMARY:

Mitral valve regurgitation is problem  that affects around 450,000 people in the United States each year.  The mitral valve prevents blood from flowing from the left ventricle back into the left atrium.  When the heart pumps, the valve is pulled closed by chords of tissue, called chordae, anchored to papillary muscles on the left ventricle wall.  In patients who have suffered a heart attack, the walls of the left ventricle often become weak and expand outward, tautening the chordae and preventing the mitral valve from closing properly.  Recent trials have shown that mitral valve function can be restored if a limited number of the chordae are cut, but open-heart surgery, the current method of doing this procedure, is not a feasible option for many patients who have suffered a heart attack. 

Students from MIT are developing a special catheter to perform chordal cutting percutaneously.  They have attempted to produce a catheter that could be fed into the left ventricle through the femoral artery and the aorta.  Their envisioned procedure involves gripping the chord to be cut with the end of the catheter, using ultrasonic imaging to make sure that the correct chord was being gripped, and then cutting the chord.  Further testing remains to be done, but their device may someday provide cardiologists with a minimally invasive way of treating mitral valve regurgitation.