Call for the 2nd Virtual Intracranial Stenting Challenge 2008 (VISC08)

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to announce the start of the 2nd Virtual Intracranial Stenting Challenge (VISC08). The objective of this year’s challenge is to assess the ability of engineering teams with expertise in computational haemodynamics in providing clinical partners with valuable pre-treatment information within the time constraints of an elective endovascular intervention.

The VISC08 will be carried out over the next 3 weeks and will be presented during a moderated poster session in occasion of the 5th Intracranial Stenting Meeting (www.ics08.com) to be held on May 5th-9th 2008 in Ankara, Turkey. The ICS08 meeting will feature demonstrations on live cases that will be carried out using advanced neuroangiographic imaging tools. Together with Dr Saruhan Cekirge, we have taken this opportunity to select image and flow data of one of these cases and two candidate stent designs that may be used for treatment.

The teams interested in participating to the challenge will be given access to patient and stent data and will be expected to perform 3D vascular geometry reconstruction, virtual stent deployment and haemodynamic simulation, possibly using the provided flow information. The output of each team will be an independent analysis illustrating advantages and disadvantages of each candidate stent for the selected patient. The results will be provided to the VISC committee in the form of a poster, whose standard format will be soon available on the VISC08 website. Deadline for poster submission will be April 27th 2008.

Each poster will be then displayed in occasion of the ICS08 in Ankara and peer-reviewed by expert clinicians. During a special session, the VISC committee will present the approach and the major findings of each poster and will select a maximum of 2 questions/suggestions provided by the clinicians to interview the attending teams. A separate roundtable discussion between attending teams and interested clinicians will be also organized. Reviews will be made available to the teams who won’t be able to attend the conference, although participation to the conference is strongly encouraged.

Please visit the VISC08 website (www.cilab.upf.edu/visc08) and download the guidelines on how to register to the challenge and obtain access rights to the patient and stent data. In particular, more information on the stent designs will be soon uploaded and notified to the teams subscribing to the challenge. We anticipate that the interaction between teams to jointly achieve the goals of the challenge is encouraged. Please feel free to contact Alessandro Radaelli (alessandro.radaelli@upf.edu) or Luca Augsburger (luca.augsburger@medecine.unige.ch) should you have any comment or doubt.

Yours Sincerely,

The VISC committee

Alessandro Radaelli and Alejandro Frangi, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, CIBER-BBN, Spain

Luca Augsburger and Daniel Rüfenacht, Université de Genève, EPFL, Switzerland

Juan Cebral, George Mason University, USA

Makoto Ohta, Tohoku University, Japan