Engineering for Health
Welcome to the web page of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBT) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). For more than 50 years we have been active in research and teaching in the field of biomedical engineering.
In interdisciplinary projects together with medical doctors and medical industry, we investigate new technical systems that help to diagnose diseases earlier and more accurately as well as systems that make therapies more successful.
The main focus of the research program of Prof. Dr. Werner Nahm's group is optical systems in medicine and life sciences. Current projects are focussing on surgical visualization and optical diagnosis [more].
The group of PD Dr. Axel Loewe develops computational models of the heart and applies them to cardiological problems. We focus on cardiac electrophysiology and elastomechanics to contribute to answer clinical questions such as the genesis of e.g. cardiac arrhythmias and appropriate treatment strategies [more].
The main focus of the research program of Prof. Dr. Olaf Dössel was the analysis of biosignals from the heart (ECG and electrograms) and the imaging of electrophysiological sources in the heart (ECG imaging) [more].
The machine learning method to predict atrial fibrillation therapy success noninvasively from the ECG is one of the first approaches trained exclusively on data from computational models and benchmarked on real world clinical data.
[report] [paper]
The German Society for Biomedical Engineering (DGBMT) annually awards the Klee Prize to scientists for practical developments in the field of medical technology. Giorgio Luongo was awarded 3rd place for his dissertation "Non-Invasive Atrial Arrhythmia Diagnosis Using the 12-Lead ECG: Machine Learning Leveraging in-silico and Clinical Signals" at IBT.
[DGMBT news] [thesis]
The wish and application of the division and faculty management to appoint the recently retired Prof. Dössel as a Distinguished Senior Fellow was positively approved by the KIT. Prof. Dössel is involved, among other things, in 3 academies of science and in international professional societies as well as an expert in his field of medical technology.
Prof. Dössel and Prof. Ivers-Tiffée are highly regarded in science nationally and internationally and contribute significantly to the visibility of KIT.
Congratulations on these two special awards!
As of June 2022, the IBT welcomes Joshua Steyer as a new research assistant within the „Computational Cardiac Modelling“ group. In the scope of the MICROCARD research project, he will investigate the effect of microscopic tissue structure on clinical electrograms using HPC simulations for an improved assessment of the vulnerability to arrhythmias and tailored ablation strategies. He studied physics and numerically analyzed spatiotemporally chaotic excitation dynamics of the heart during his Master’s thesis at the MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization.
More
In cooperation with physicians from the St. Anne’s University Hospital, Brno, researchers at IBT showed that a dyssynchronous activation of the left ventricle is insufficient to result in a breakdown of the typical torsional contraction pattern in patients diagnosed with heart failure.
More
Tobias Gerach successfully defended his dissertation „ Personalized Electromechanical Modeling of the Human Heart - Challenges and Opportunities in Pathophysiological Scenarios “ on May 19th 2022 and passed the doctoral exam with distinction. Sincere congratulations to our new PhD from the team’s whole heart!