Dive Brief:
- Philips has shared details of its role in a federally funded robotic stroke care initiative, revealing that the project is building on its Azurion image-guided therapy platform.
- The medtech company, which provided the information on Wednesday, will work with academic partners to combine its platform with new technologies to facilitate autonomous procedures.
- Philips’ program, which started last month and is worth up to $33.7 million, is part of a broader Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, initiative involving companies including Siemens Healthineers.
Dive Insight:
ARPA-H, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, is providing up to $175.3 million to fund development of microbots and endovascular robots. Philips and Siemens Healthineers are involved in the endovascular robotics project, which aims to develop autonomous systems capable of partly or completely performing procedures. The systems could improve access to timely stroke care.
Philips will combine its existing image-guided therapy infrastructure with a steerable catheter and imitation-learning algorithms. A team at Johns Hopkins University is developing an autonomous device navigation system, and Boston University researchers are working on steerable catheters. Weill Cornell Medicine’s J. Mocco, chair of neurological surgery, is also involved in the project.
“Robotics has the potential to improve precision and accuracy in endovascular stroke care, while also extending specialist expertise through remote procedures,” Mocco said in a statement.
ARPA-H will give Kitware up to $17.5 million to provide a virtual simulation and validation test bed for Philips’ robot. The simulation will include a physics-based representation of the blood vessels, as well as robots with multiple controlled degrees of freedom.
Siemens Healthineers, Magnendo and University of California, San Diego, the other three organizations awarded funds to develop stroke robots, will also have access to the test bed. ARPA-H predicted that public availability of data and software from the projects will simplify the regulatory path for other companies in the space.
