Research
Clinical Applications
euHeart has, as overarching objective, the ambition to demonstrate the clinical benefit of biophysical modelling in the field of cardiovascular disease. For that purpose, five clinical applications with epidemiologically significance have been selected:
For each of these applications, a clinical prototype will be set up integrating appropriate biophysical model, simulation environment, image processing software, and link to clinical data. A validation of the approaches will be carried out in each application on a cohort of patients. A small-scale multicenter trial, including approximately 120 patients, will be performed to demonstrate the clinical benefit to determine the optimal lead placement in cardiac resynchronization therapy, a treatment that improves the coordination of the heart’s contractions.
Technical Development
The development of the clinical applications will be supported by a scientific activity providing a common infrastructure and a set of generic tools.
In the work package Integrated multi-scale cardiac modelling, a database of generic computational multi-scale models will be created including the electro-mechanical function of the heart, the perfusion of cardiac muscle and the haemodynamics of the chambers and great vessels. These models, which deal with all spatial scales from cell to tissue and organ, will be based on the VPH model encoding standards CellML and FieldML, extended specifically for the need of the project.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) will be developed within the work package on Modelling standards and software tools to facilitate the use of these standards throughout the project. This work package will also address the graphical display of images, models and simulation results, and will provide tools for image fusion.
The analysis and segmentation of images from various clinical imaging modalities is the topic of the work package Anatomical model personalisation. Morphing between the segmented images and the models of the model database using biophysical constraints will also be addressed in this work package.
The work package Biophysical model personalisation will apply inverse techniques for material parameter (physiological) personalisation, an essential step to enable diagnosis and treatment using patient-specific simulations.
