The SENSA (Stenosis Assessment System for Endoscopic) project has been awarded with an economic aid within the AGAUR PRODUCTE 2014 call. The proposal is led by PhD Jorge Bernal, with the participation of PhD. Debora Gil of Interactive Modeling and enhanced group (IAM) and PhD F. Javier Sanchez Industrial Vision Group (Machine Vision) the Computer Vision Centre (CVC). This proposal also includes the participation of researchers from IDIBELL, led by Dr. Antoni Rosell. The purpose of the call is PRODUCTE 2014 financing aid for obtaining prototypes and recovery and transfer of research results generated by research teams from Catalonia.
The objective is to deploy a working prototype at the Hospital de Bellvitge (HB) that allows clinicians to automatically obtain an estimate of the degree of stenosis. In recent years, the CVC, in close cooperation with HB, has developed an automatic system for calculating the degree of tracheal stenosis by analyzing image videobronchoscopy. Tracheal stenosis is defined as an abnormal narrowing of the trachea and major bronchi affecting respiratory function. In recent decades, tracheal stenosis has become a prevalent disease with more than 65 million people worldwide. Within the framework of the cooperation between CVC and HB it has been developed a software that allows providing a standardized measurement of stenosis because, despite the routine nature and relevance of the diagnosis of stenosis, most of its evaluation performed by visual inspection during the endoscopic examination. The lack of standardized objective measurements has a negative impact on the treatment chosen encouraging unnecessary repeat examinations.
Thus, it has been developed a software that allows to provide standardized measures of stenosis; SENSA allows standardize the calculation of the degree of stenosis by calculating the same from the selection of images showing both airway obstruction and a section of healthy way to calculate the degree of tracheal obstruction. Besides offering an objective degree of tracheal obstruction of calculation, it is the only product that works directly with videobronchoscopy images without using other imaging technologies or modify existing commercial devices. Therefore, SENSA is a breakthrough for videobronchoscopy, allowing the reduction of the costs of the process by avoiding duplication and incorrect treatment due to logical subjectivity derived from the visual inspection and enables a reduction of emotional stress of the patient, and the risk of radiation of other methods. The economic impact is estimated at € 71,000 million savings per year, using estimated data of the number of times per year that the interventions must be repeated.
