Roberta Piazza

University of Pisa | UNIPI · Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery

Biomedical engineering integrates a variety of applied sciences with life sciences to improve human health and reduce the invasiveness of surgical procedures. Technological advances, achieved through biomedical engineering, have contributed to significant improvements in the field of vascular and endovascular surgery. This paper aims to review the...

INTRODUCTION: Mastering surgery and treatments of spine-related conditions require long training times. The need for cost-effective structured training is raising. Training through simulation can potentially revolutionize the standard paradigm if proper simulators are developed and tested. The purpose of this review was to evaluate the literature l...

Cryosurgery is a technique of growing popularity involving tissue ablation under controlled freezing. Technological advancement of devices along with surgical technique improvements have turned cryosurgery from an experimental to an established option for treating several diseases. However, cryosurgery is still limited by inaccurate planning based...

In situ fenestration of stent-graft represents a potential option for the treatment of aortic diseases in patients unsuitable for standard endovascular repair. The best fenestration strategy to restore perfusion of collateral vessels after their coverage by an endograft depends mainly on the anatomical area. Several tools are employed as fenestrati...

Purpose: This work aims to develop a simple, anatomically and haptically realistic vascular phantom, compatible with intravascular and intracardiac ultrasound. The low-cost, dual-layered phantom bridges the gap between traditional wall-only and wall-less phantoms by showing both the vessel wall and surrounding tissue in ultrasound imaging. This ph...

Objective At present, there is no proficiency-based curriculum for endovascular treatment of aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR) using virtual reality (VR) surgical simulators, whereas such curricula are available for the treatment of iliac and/or superficial femoral artery disease. The purpose of this work was to compute proficiency, defined by a benchm...

Objective: This work aims at providing novel endovascular instrumentation to overcome current technical limitations of in situ endograft fenestration including challenges in targeting the fenestration site under fluoroscopic control and supplying mechanical support during endograft perforation. Technology: Novel electromagnetically trackable instru...

VR navigation systems have emerged as a particularly useful tool for the guidance of minimally invasive surgical procedures to restore the 3D perception of the surgical field and augment the visual information available to the surgical team. Over the past decade, X-ray free VR navigation systems based on Electromagnetic (EM) tracking have been prop...

The focal length of available optical see-through (OST) head-mounted displays (HMDs) is at least 2 m therefore, during manual tasks, the user eye cannot keep in focus both the virtual and real content at the same time. Another perceptual limitation is related to the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC), this latter being present in binocular visio...

The in situ laser fenestration is an interesting option for the endovascular treatment of short‐necked aneurysms with an intraoperative modification of a standard endograft. According to literature evidence, diode laser emitting in the near infrared wavelength (810 nm) can be successfully used to fenestrate the endograft fabric. This paper describe...

In non-urban scenarios: rural areas or small cities, there is often a limited access to specialistic healthcare due to the inherent challenges associated with recruitment, retention, and access to healthcare professionals. Telemedicine is an economical and effective way to address this problem. In this research, we developed a framework for real-ti...

Virtual Reality (VR) is promising not just for the game and entertainment industry, but also for the medical and surgical fields, to develop simulation systems and navigation tools for the intra-operative assistance. Electromagnetic (EM) tracking technology is today widely proposed in the context of computer-assisted medical interventions. In this...

Purpose: The in situ fenestration of a standard endograft is currently limited by difficulties in targeting the fenestration site under fluoroscopic control and by the lack of a safe method to perforate the graft. Evidence in the literature suggests the use of a 3 D electromagnetic navigator to accurately guide the endovascular instruments to the t...

The in-situ endograft fenestration, a possible surgical option for the minimally invasive treatment of aneurysms with unfavorable anatomy, is today limited by difficulties in targeting the fenestration site and by the lack of a safe method to perforate the graft. In this work we suggest the use of: a 3D electromagnetic (EM) navigator, to accurately...

Endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) repair (EVAR) involves the minimally invasive implantation of a stent-graft within the aorta to exclude the aneurysm from the circulation thus preventing its rupture. The feasibility of EVAR is highly dependent on the aorta morphology: the presence of one/both renal arteries emerging from the aneurysm i...

Purpose Elastosonography (ES) is an ultrasound (US) technique which allows to evaluate elastic properties of tissues under external compression [1] and has been first proposed in the 1990' s for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. ES phantoms are useful to test and optimize the perfonnance of ES devices and for training purposes but also to valid...