Claudia Nagel participated at the Cardiac Physiome Workshop and at the annual meeting of the American heart association. She presented her latest results regarding the influence of the ventricular shape on simulated QRS complexes in the ECG and showed that an estimation of the left atrial fibrotic volume fraction based on simulated P waves was possible with an average error of 8.7%.

Olaf Dössel and Claudia Nagel participated in the first international workshop on metrology for virtual measuring instruments. Olaf Dössel held a keynote lecture about digital twins in medicine and Claudia Nagel talked about how fidelity of simulated ECGs can be assessed for a successful and meaningful application of simulated signals to clinical use cases.

The biannual Atrial Signals conference convened at KIT in September. More than 200 experts from both engineering and clinical communities joined discussions and presented the latest research.

We welcome Miriam Weiß as a new research scholarship holder in the group "Optical Technologies in Medicine".

Have you ever dreamed of your own startup? Have you ever been curious about realizing your own product idea? – Then, the Student Innovation Lab is your place to go! Make the new ‘Computer Vision for Health’ Lab by Zeiss and IBT your think tank!
Experience the complete startup process from ideation and prototyping to the pitch in front of potential investors. 
2 terms, 15 ECTS (Economics: 18 ECTS), application until October 10th here! 

Claudia Nagel, Steffen Schuler, Olaf Dössel and Axel Loewe published a paper on a bi-atrial statisical shape model. The model includes the anatomical shape variations of the atria in the study population and was analyzed with standard evaluation criteria. The shape model and 100 exemplary atrial geometries suitable for electrophysiological simulations are openly available online.

Olaf Dössel, Giorgio Luongo, Claudia Nagel and Axel Loewe have written a review article that deals with the calculation of the ECG from computer models of the heart. Both the healthy heart and simulations of various heart diseases are considered. It becomes clear how computer modeling can contribute to a better interpretation of the EKG.

During the iHeart conference from July 1-3, about 200 participants virtually presented and discussed their research. The IBT was successfully involved with two presentations.

Congratulations to Jorge Patricio Sanchez Arciniegas on the completion of his PhD and the beginning of his work at IBT as a postdoc.

Researchers at IBT investigated how accurate a transit time measurement of an indicator bolus can be and proposed methods to enhance the accuracy. The work was published in the  Frontiers in Physiology .

A scientist of the IBT presented and discussed their research titled: “Spatial and Quantitative Assessment of the Correlation between Sinus Rhythm and Atrial Fibrillation Voltage Mapping to Identify Low Voltage Substrate in Persistent Atrial Fibrillation“ at this years EHRA congress. The congress was held online from the 23-25th of April, with this years' scientific program emphasising “Making connections to overcome arrhythmia”.

Der Workshop des IBT im Rahmen des Girls‘ Day 2021 traf auf großes Interesse des weiblichen Nachwuchses in den Bereichen Medizin und Technik.

Since April 1st, 2021 Dr. Marie Houillon is new research assistant in the computational cardiac modeling group at IBT.

Researchers at IBT showed the influence of the chosen protocol to induce arrhythmia on the assessment of atrial fibrillation vulnerability.

The paper was published in Frontiers of Physiology and is freely available.

IBT researches have published a paper, which presents a model-based method for solving an inverse problem of the heart biomechanics.

Nicolas Pilia defended his dissertation „Electrocardiogram Signal Analysis and Simulations for Non-Invasive Diagnosis - Model-Based and Data-Driven Approaches for the Estimation of Ionic Concentrations and Localization of Excitation Origins“ on February 18th 2021 and graduated with distinction. Congratulations!

IBT researches in collaboration with the University Heart Centre Freiburg have published a paper comparing unipolar and bipolar voltage mapping for localisation of atrial substrate.

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A scientist of the IBT presented and discussed his results on the simulation of the propagation of photons in a blood vessel.

Researches of IBT, together with researchers from Bologna, Milan, and New York, published a review article on the current state of ECG-based potassium and calcium blood concentration measurements.

Publication of the investigation of the discretization error and its reduction in the geodesic length measurement.

Contributions by the university medical center Freiburg and IBT resulted in a paper on the identification of intraatrial arrhythmogenic sources using intracardiac electrogram characteristics.

IBT researchers published two novel methods for a non-invasive atrial flutter characterization together with physicians from the University of Leicester, the ABC Federal University, and the clinicians form the Städtisches Klinikum Karlsruhe in the journal “IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering”. Spatio-temporal recurrence quantification analysis methods were used to characterize and discriminate several atrial flutter mechanisms from the 12-lead ECG in a computational framework. Thanks to these methods, the duration of the invasive atrial mapping and ablation procedure might shorten significantly. The computational study was complemented and fortified by a clinical case used as a proof of concept.

Together with researchers from the University of Szeged, IBT researchers have published a review article on the role of the sodium calcium exchanger for the activity of natural pacemaker cells. These cells are located in the so-called sinus node of the heart and make for the rhythmic beating of our hearts. The review article integrates findings from experimental studies with computational modeling. It was published in the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal and is freely available (open access).

openCARP is an open cardiac electrophysiology simulator for in-silico experiments. Its source code is public and the software is freely available for academic purposes. openCARP is easy to use and offers single cell as well as multiscale simulations from ion channel to organ level. Additionally, openCARP includes a wide variety of functions for pre- and post-processing of data as well as visualization. The python-based CARPutils framework enables the user to develop and share simulation pipelines, i.e. automating in-silico experiments including all modeling/simulation steps.
openCARP is a joint effort of the Medical University of Graz (Gernot Plank), LIRYC Bordeaux (Ed Vigmond), U Freiburg (Gunnar Seemann) and KIT (Axel Loewe).

The sinus node is the natural pacemaker of the heart initiating each heart beat. Its pacemaking function results from the interplay of to cooperating systems: the so-called membrane clock and the calcium clock. The precise role of these two mechanisms is incompletely understood. Together with a group of experimental researchers from Szeged (Hungrary), the Cardiac Modeling group could now further elucidate the role of the calcium clock. A novel pharmacological agent allows to specifically block the sodim-calcium exchanger. IBT researcher could reproduce and further investigate this effect mechanistically in a computational model. By combining experiment and computer simulation, the crucial role of the sodium-calcium exchanger and the interplay with the membrane clock could be consolidated. The study explains how the natural pacemaker of the heart becomes robust and reliable through the interplay of the two systems calcium clock and membrane clock.

Axel Loewe from IBT was invited to present at the 10th "TRM Forum on the Computer Simulation of Cardiac Function“. The meeting brings together leading experts on computational modeling, experimental assessment, and clinical research in the field of cardiac arrhythmias. We contributed to this year’s theme „Towards the Digital Twin“ by presenting work that allows to build a biomechanical twin of an individual patient. In addition, the session "Atrial modeling & experimental data" was chaired by the IBT researcher.