One treatment option for aortic root diseases is the valve-sparing aortic root replacement (David procedure), which repairs the aortic valve and replaces a segment of the aorta with a prosthetic graft. The valve's tightness is assessed visually during the surgery, and afterwards via echocardiography. In 20% of the cases, the valve doesn't close properly, requiring reoperation, which is harmful and costly, and may prevent treatment for fragile patients due to the high reoperation risk. That's why we developed a simple and fast measuring device to directly quantify valve leakage during surgery. In the western world (EU, USA, CAN) 25k David procedures/year are conducted. Our team is composed of a biomedical engineer, three cardiac surgeons and a mechnical engineer.
