INESC TEC develops pioneer project to support breast reconstruction

A joint team of INESC TEC researchers, that involve the Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM) and the Technology Licensing Office (SAL), developed a software that intends to help surgeons in breast reconstructions that use DIEAP - Deep Inferior Epigastric Artery Perforator Flap.

Ricardo Araújo, Hélder Oliveira and Daniel Vasconcelos are the researchers involved in this partnership with Champalimaud Foundation, that has been working with INESC TEC for over 10 years in several areas, namely breast cancer. 

The Foundation concluded that its process of breast reconstruction demands a great deal of preliminary planning, but the methodology used still presents some inaccuracies. In that sense, it was proposed a challenge to develop a new software that could help doctors during breast reconstruction surgeries, which analyses, measures and maps the vascular network of some regions of difficult access. Considering that this surgery implies extracting abdominal tissue to transplant to the breast area, and that it is very important that the blood vessels in that tissue have quality, the developed software allows to understand this quality through a thorough exam that can show the doctor which are the “vascular paths” more suitable, something that otherwise could not be possible.

The project is unique and the next step is to regulate its terms, in order to fulfill the team’s purposes, that include also enhancing the software to other areas in medicine that also need to evaluate the quality of the vascular system, and, at the same time, take this technology to every part in the world.

 
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC.