Partnership

Istituto Superiore di Sanità

Business activities

The 'Istituto Superiore di Sanità' (ISS) is a technical scientific organ of the Italian National Health Service. It enjoys scientific, organisational, administrative and accounting independence and is subject to monitoring by the Italian Ministry of Health. It undertakes research, experimental, control and training functions in relation to the public health in Italy. The ISS collaborates with the Minister of Health in the preparation and implementation of health and scientific planning. It promotes programmes of national interest in conformity with the objectives of the National Health Plan in collaboration with the Regions, local health boards, hospitals and national and international institutions. It also promotes research programmes on the relationship between environment and health and clinical research programmes of national interest, to be carried out at scientific and local hospitals. It takes part in foreign and international projects aimed at protection of public health, as well as in study and research programmes of national organisations.

At this moment, ISS is going to be involved into a new organisational model for biomedical research within which the Institute will have a prominent role. The principal objectives of this project should be in line with those of the National Health Plan and their validity should be judged in terms of the immediate and potential impact that these changes will have on the quality of Public Health Care. The promotion of public health, the National Health Plan’s primary objective, should be achieved through the prevention of illness and a more correct life-style and supported by research projects that can quickly identify the effectiveness of the actions being implemented and the corrective measures to be taken.

The Laboratory of Biomedical Engineering of the ISS offers to the SMART-PIV project its own long-term experience in the field of fluid dynamic characterisation of Implantable devices in the cardiovascular system and, more generally, of physical models of circulatory districts. The equipment already present at the Laboratory allows LDA and PIV measurements, as well as high-speed videography analyses. Different pulse duplicators are at disposal for accurate investigations in pulsatile regime. Actually, it is well known that the fluid dynamics of, e.g., prosthetic heart valves in unsteady flows is very different from that relative to constant flow rate, even if the same instantaneous flow rate is considered: this implies that facilities - such as those currently used in the Laboratory - for studying implantable devices in their normal operating conditions, i.e., in pulsatile regime, are essential for the objective of this project.

With the objective of the accurate and reliable use of PIV-based measurements of biomedical devices, the Laboratory of Biomedical Engineering is able to provide for testing purposes four distinct types of implantable devices: arterial stents, prosthetic vessels, prosthetic heart valves and artificial ventricles.