About 8 to 12 million in the U.S suffer from Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD), a common vascular problem caused by narrowing of the arteries resulting from plaque buildup. Plaque accumulation in the body’s extremities can increase a person’s risk for heart attack and stroke by up to six times.
Because most patients are asymptomatic and there is no single reliable screening method, PAD is considerably under diagnosed. Most of the undiagnosed and untreated patients are diabetics who commonly suffer from peripheral neuropathy and as a result, do not sense and report symptoms, such as pain while walking.
In fact, more than 60 percent of all lower extremity amputations in the U.S. are performed on diabetic patients with PAD. With the number of diabetic patients expected to triple and reach almost 100 million by 2050, the problems related to undiagnosed PAD will only rise in the years to come.
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology at Columbia University, http://bme.columbia.edu Andreas Hielscher, is developing a novel technology that could improve diagnosis of this disease and make monitoring easier for doctors and patients.
To build and test the new Vascular Optical Tomographic Imaging (VOTI) system, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) www.nhlbi.nih.gov within NIH awarded a $2.5 million five year grant to develop the technology.
The VOTI system uses near-infrared light to map the concentration of hemoglobin in the body’s tissue and reveals how well blood in perfusing through the hands and feet. Transmitted light intensities are then used to generate spatially resolved maps of oxy and deoxy-hemoglobin which are the two main components of blood.
The results of the team’s latest study involving 20 patients and 20 healthy volunteers were recently published in the “European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery” www.ejves.com. “This is probably the most exciting new technology in the field” notes Gautam Shrikhande, a vascular surgeon and former director of the Vascular Laboratory at the Columbia University Medical Center www.columbiasurgery.org/vascular/laboratory.html, and co-author of the study.”
Hielscher plans to use the NHLBI funding to build upon research previously funded by a Translational Research Grant from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to develop a new prototype and test the technology in a larger clinical study.
Hielscher is also working with the Partnership for New York fund to commercialize certain aspects of this technology. He has received funding through the Partnership’s Bioaccelerate Program www.bioacceleratenvc.org to develop a commercially viable device that can be used intra-operatively and guide interventions by vascular surgeons.
Monitoring wound healing is another promising application for this technology and the research team has already filed a broad patent application and think that a commercial device could be available within two years.