Seamless MR-guided treatments and interventions reduce procedural complexity in cardiology, oncology, and neurology

Medical imaging procedures are often complex, requiring clinicians to navigate multiple imaging modalities, user interfaces, and treatment planning tools. This fragmentation can lead to confusion, possibly leading to mistakes or inefficiencies. Additionally, ensuring high-quality images for precise treatment planning remains a challenge.

The ITEA project SIGNET, gathering 13 partners from Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States, aimed to replace these complex medical workflows and procedures with single episodes of personalised, dose-adaptive, precision MR-guided treatments and interventions. The project developed a series of AI-enabled solutions, and a generic Common Open MR Remote Acquisition and Data Exchange (COMRADE) interface between scanner and treatment devices. This enables the seamless integration of various MR-guided therapy devices with an MR system in a scalable manner. Treatment accuracy is also improved via integrated device controls, a consolidated user interface and algorithms for better image quality.

These solutions enable a single episode of care, reducing planning iterations, treatment time, and healthcare congestion while improving treatment quality. Validated demonstrators within the SIGNET project have proven the efficiency and effectiveness of this digital ecosystem in three use cases: cardiology, oncology and neurology. We invite you to watch the demonstrator videos for each use case below.

Cardiology use case

In this integrated cardiac ablation demonstration, Imricor’s catheter tracking system, Adas3D’s 3D cardiology planning and LifeTec’s platform that prompts harvested pig hearts to beat in the same manner as human hearts, were connected to the Philips MR system at Amsterdam University Medical Center, which also applied advanced algorithms and image processing techniques. The result is one seamless process for integrated cardiac ablation.

Oncology use case

Machnet Medical Robotics and Philips demonstrate a robotics-mediated MR-guided biopsy, in which an integrated biopsy robot autonomously inserts a needle into the breast to perform tissue extraction without human intervention. This enables precise targeting, reducing the need for multiple hospital visits.

Neurology use case

Philips, imeka and stereoDive demonstrate their integrated stereotactic neurosurgical planning solution during a laser ablation procedure, where a laser probe is inserted deep into the brain to ablate unwanted tissue. This StereoDiver solution consolidates multiple disconnected software packages currently required for the procedure into a single, unified platform, streamlining the workflow and reducing complexity.

More information:

• https://signetproject.com/
• https://itea4.org/project/signet.html