Wenham, MA—vascuVis was awarded the highly competitive NSF SBIR Phase I funding for development of vascuCAP, to begin January 2013. The Wenham based company seeks to establish feasibility and market potential of vascuCAP, the company’s vascular disease computer-aided prognostic software.
The goal of Phase I research is a software development endpoint. CAP seeks to extend beyond static diagnostics to prognosticate the likely future progression of plaque vulnerability; previous approaches rely on identifying a small number of features hypothesized to be precursor to an acute event. The research objective is to develop an integrated segmentation, registration and classification MRI scan and computer aided analysis toolkit for prognosis prediction of stable or unstable plaque from longitudinal MRI data.
Distinguishing which vascular lesions will have favorable outcomes (versus unfavorable) requires quantification and feature characterization algorithms, in addition to sophisticated image analysis, accentuating the subtle imaging differences between these related pathologies.
We will demonstrate probable clinical utility by the successful extraction of values that meet or exceed the manually produced preliminary results from available animal and human MRI datasets.
This technology represents a cost effective, safe and capable plaque assessment tool, so that patients could be treated more effectively, sooner, and more appropriately. vascuCAP also creates an end-user capability that could be used in the 20,000 existing MRI units installed worldwide.
For more information contact Andrew Buckler, vascuVis President and CEO, (978) 468-0508, 225 Main Street, Suite 15, Wenham, MA 01984, Andrew.Buckler@vascuVis.com, www.vascuVis.com
