Summary
Socio-economical challenge
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has a significant impact on the European society in terms of mortality, morbidity and allied healthcare costs. Indeed, it causes over 1.9 million deaths in the EU every year (42% of all deaths) with a total estimated cost of EUR 169 billion.
Rationale
The aim of the euHeart project is to incorporate ICT tools and integrative multi-scale computational models of the heart within clinical environments to improve diagnosis, treatment planning and interventions for CVD and thus to reduce the allied healthcare costs. These computational models also provide an excellent basis to optimize the design of implantable devices for improved therapy. The opportunity of multi-scale modelling spanning multiple anatomical levels (sub-cellular level up to whole heart) is to provide a consistent, biophysically-based framework for the integration of the huge amount of fragmented and inhomogeneous data currently available. However, the application of this research has not yet been translated into clinical environments mainly due to the difficulty of efficiently personalising the biophysical models and to the lack of multidisciplinary research.
Aim
euHeart’s response to these challenges is to bring together groups experienced in physiological modelling and physiological and clinical cardiac function to develop, integrate and clinically validate patient-specific computational models of the cardiac physiology and disease-related processes. The main outcome of euHeart will be a framework for the description and representation of normal and pathological multi-scale and multi-physics cardiovascular models, using the international encoding standards CellML and FieldML. In addition, a library of innovative tools for the execution of the biophysical simulations, the personalisation of the models and the automated analysis of multi-modal images will be developed. An environment for the viewing of and interaction with the biophysical models along with multi-modal images, functional information and simulation results will also be provided.
Clinical applications
These tools will be directly applied to improve specific CVD related outcomes and to demonstrate the significant potential of biophysical models for improving human healthcare. Evidence of clinical benefit will be collected to quantify the potential impact for a number of CVD and associated therapies which are significant in terms of both healthcare spent and quality of life in Europe, namely:
The selected clinical applications complement each other such that the resulting biophysical models will cover the wide range of the phenomena describing the cardiac fluid-electro-mechanical function.
Consortium
The consortium consists of a well balanced mix of academic leadership in biophysical modelling, clinical sites with pioneering experience in using biomedical imaging for diagnosis and therapy monitoring, and complementary industrial partners ensuring the exploitation of the wealth of models developed in this project. euHeart provides a unique platform for the integration of all the required components to bring prototypes to clinical and commercial environments for model validation and dissemination, and also to demonstrate the tangible clinical and economic potential of the Virtual Physiological Human for delivering improved human healthcare outcomes.
