From March 30 to April 1, the annual meeting of the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) took place, bringing together scientists, healthcare professionals, and key stakeholders from around the world involved in arrhythmia management. Axel Loewe and Silvia Becker represented the IBT at the event. Additionally, Silvia gave a presentation on why it matters how the P-wave is measured in the ECG.

From March 12 to 14, the E-Science Days took place in Heidelberg with the theme “Research Data Management: Challenges in a Changing World.” Axel Loewe and Silvia Becker represented the IBT in the workshop “Information Infrastructures in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges,” organized by the Leibniz ScienceCampus DiTraRe. Additionally, Silvia Becker, together with Lea Singson from FIZ Karlsruhe, gave a presentation on the legal aspects of digital twins and synthetic ECGs.

A new paper investigating the interactions between reduced extracellular calcium levels and sympathetic stimulation as a compensatory mechanism, potentially contributing to sudden cardiac death in chronic kidney disease patients, has been published in the Journal of Physiology.

Our recent publication "Consensus Statement on the Credibility Assessment of Machine Learning Predictors" in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics aims to ensure the reliability and credibility of machine learning models used in clinical and biomedical contexts. Together with other leading experts, we outline a structured framework based on 12 foundational statements and propose rigorous guidelines for evaluating and enhancing the credibility of ML predictors, particularly when used in high-stakes healthcare decisions.

A new paper introduces the latest version of the DREAM for simulating cardiac arrhythmias. Published in Engineering with Computers, it provides an efficient approach to reentry simulations in cardiac electrophysiology.
Read the full paper here.

On November 15th, the very first Nacht der Biosignale took place. Simultaneous talks on the fascinating topic of biosignals were held at twelve locations across Germany, including Aachen, Augsburg, Bremen, Dresden, Göttingen, Ilmenau, Jena, Karlsruhe, Kiel, Cologne, Krefeld, and Münster.
Thanks to a live stream on YouTube, the talks were also accessible to an online audience. The event was met with great enthusiasm, with the Triangel venue filling up with curious citizens eager to dive into the captivating world of biosignals.

The head of the Computational Cardiac Modeling research group has been elected as a Fellow of the  European Heart Rhythm Association (FEHRA). This recognizes outstanding contributions to research into cardiac arrhythmias.

Together with researchers from Städtisches Klinikum Karlsruhe and Oxford University, Patricia Martínez and team showed that for atrial arrhythmia prediction, functional measurements make a difference. Incorporating functional personalization into personalize models could improve the ability to stratify patients based on their individual characteristics, leading to more tailored and effective treatment strategies for atrial fibrillation.

Pascal Maierhofer is working on the validation and improvement of digital twins of the heart for the localization of atrial fibrillation triggers. His focus areas are the application of computer science to medical topics.

From September 18 to September 20 the IBT took part at the BMT2024 (“58th Annual Conference of the German Society for Biomedical Engineering) in Stuttgart. Sara Schwab won the second place in the student’s competition.

KIT hosted the 51st International Computing in Cardiology Conference in Karlsruhe from September 8-11, welcoming over 500 researchers from all over the world. The experts discussed the latest advances in cardiology research and technology in fields including modeling & simulation, ECG signal processing and artificial intelligence in over 220 presentations and 200 posters.

On Sunday September 8, 8:30-11:30am, Mathworks offers a workshop on "Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Enhanced Processing of Biomedical Signals with MATLAB" on KIT Campus South.

Interested participants can find more information and register here.

The 48th conference of the ESC Working Group on Cardiac Cellular Electrophysiology took place in Graz from July 1 to 3. The focus was on the influence of the autonomic nervous system on heart rate and arrhythmias, compartmentalisation within cardiac myocytes and the latest experimental findings on iPSC cardiac myocytes. Moritz took the opportunity to present his work on the influence of the autonomic nervous system in sinoatrial node cell models.

From June 24 to June 26, the 8th International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Biomedical Engineering (CMBE) took place at the George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Our PhD student Stephanie was there to present our work on exploring the potential role of stretch-activated channels in the pathogenesis of atrial fibrillation in a mini-symposium on innovative computational models and methods for the cardiac function.

The 49th edition of the International Congress on Electrocardiology, jointly organized by ISE and ISHNE, was held in Lund, Sweden in June. Axel Loewe presented research at the intersection of mechanistic modeling and machine learning to the mixed clinical/technical audience. As this year marks the centennial of Einthoven's Nobel Prize for the electrocardiogram (ECG), the conference was a perfect occasion to celebrate this invention that remains of utmost relevance for clinical practice and is poised to be propelled to new heights with the advent of artificial intelligence.

From June 6th to 8th, IBT attended the Atrial Signals Conference in Maastricht. In addition to 4 poster presentations by our PhD students, Axel Loewe presented his visions for the future of computational models of the heart in atrial fibrillation research.

Carmen Martínez Antón successfully defended her PhD thesis „Local Impedance Characterization for Scar and Fibrosis Detection – Towards a New Substrate Assessment for Atrial Mapping” on April 25th 2024. Our heartfelt congratulations!

From March 18 to March 22, 2024 the 94th annual meeting of the GAMM (Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics) took place in Magdeburg at the Otto von Guericke university. Our PhD student Jonathan Krauß presented a comparison of different pericardium modeling approaches.

What influence does the inclusion of the right atrium have on the assessment of arrhythmia susceptibility in patient-specific computer models? In this study, we investigated differences in arrhythmia susceptibility between monoatrial and biatrial models. Our results suggest that inclusion of the right atrium increases inducibility in the model and also shows a state-dependent influence on arrhythmia dynamics.

On March 19th and 20th 2024, the Institute of Biomedical Engineering is hosting an in person Software Carpentry workshop, primarily open to graduate students and research staff at KIT.

On January 29, the KIT Center for Health Technologies presented itself to the Karlsruhe city society in the city hall. KIT Distinguished Senior Fellow Prof. Dössel gave a lecture on "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Medicine".

The Institute of Biomedical Engineering welcomes Silvia Becker as a new research associate. Since January 2024, she has been working on the analysis of ECG data using machine learning within the “Computational Cardiac Modeling” research group.
Silvia Becker completed a master’s degree in electrical and information technology at the KIT. Her research topics focused on machine learning and heart simulations.

Prof. Elena De Momi, from Politecnico di Milano University (Italy), hasVisiting Professor at IBT
joined the IBT for 2 months, sponsored by the International Excellence Grants of KIT. Prof. De Momi is renown in the field of Medical Robotics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. She will work with the group of Prof. Francesca Spadea to develop an explainable artificial intelligence-based framework to predict the surgical outcome of patients affected from late-stage ovarian cancer.

From September 26 to September 28 the IBT took part at the BMT2023 (“57th Annual Conference of the German Society for Biomedical Engineering) in Duisburg. Christian Götz won the first place in the student’s competition and Laura Unger was honored with the first prize in the Klee Award for her PhD thesis.

Together with clinicians in Freiburg and industrial partners in Barcelona, we analyzed differences in atrial substrate localization using late gadolinium enhancement-magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI), electrogram voltage, and conduction velocity. A newly proposed LGE-MRI analysis method increases coherence but discordances exist.

As a contribution to the FIMH conference, using simulations, we investigated abnormal excitation patterns in the atrium and their electrograms. In contrast to existing studies, we here considered the curvature, different wall thicknesses, as well as electric heterogeneity in a realistic right-atrial geometry.

Extra heartbeats from the main chambers of the heart, so-called ventricular extrasystoles, can be related to serious diseases. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) use machine learning to determine the origin of the extrasystoles non-invasively.

Our latest paper describes a methodology to generate anatomical and functional atrial digital twins personalized models from imaging data and/or electroanatomical maps.

The reproducible and automated framework processes geometries derived from clinical data.

The IBT was represented in the tent of the new KIT Center Health Technologies at the Open Day and was happy to welcome many of the about 25,000 visitors about personalized and digital medicine, optical methods in medicine as well as the study course medical engineering.

In cooperation with researchers from the Institute for Medical Informatics and Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Heidelberg University Hospital, IBT employees have developed a method to display the 3D geometry of the head as 2D images, which enables a CNN-based classification of head deformities.

The foundation Familie Klee and the German Society for Biomedical Engineering (DGBMT) within the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE) annually give out an award for practically oriented research and development in medical technology. This year’s jury chose Dr.-Ing. Laura Anna Unger and her dissertation on multimodal characterization of the atrial substrate as the winner. Completed with honors at IBT in 2022, the particularly intense collaboration with cardiologists contributed significantly to the success of the project.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) funds the Collaborative Research Center "Wave Phenomena" for 4 more years after intensive review. We are happy to contribute with the use case propagation waves in the heart!

The recently published 2nd edition of the special issue of the journal Frontiers in Physiology highlights the latest developments for technology to diagnose, monitor and treat atrial fibrillation. The collection of 16 articles is co-edited by IBT researcher Axel Loewe.

Assessing the radiosensitivity of tumoral cells is of paramount importance for understanding the efficacy of radiotherapy treatments and design the proper dose delivery scheme. In this work we showed that the topology of 2D cancer-cell graphs is influenced by ionizing radiation and can be capture by microscopy mage analysis.

Following our previous Radiomics based study, we tailored a Deep Learning (3D ResNet) to predict the Overall Survival of patients with PCNSL. The aim was to overcome the limitation of feature selection and engineering by self-learning relevant image features. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping was applied to interpret the results.

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In collaboration with the Biomedical Physics group at the MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, we investigated time series of the success rates for cardiac defibrillation. Using a simplified 2D model for chaotic excitation dynamics, we got some interesting insights, especially for the success of low-energy pulses.

In the latest episode of the Signals for Life podcast of the German Society for Biomedical Engineering (DGBMT) in the VDE, Laura Unger from IBT and Armin Luik from the Karlsruhe Municipal Hospital present their joint research on atrial fibrillation. Another episode will follow soon!

Together with researchers from the Università degli Studi di Milano and the Municipal Hospital Karlsruhe, we present a recommendation system for the ablation treatment of atrial flutter. Based on graph theoretic methods, the optimal configuration of the ablation scars to be applied is automatically determined with the help of optimization algorithms.

With the title "Together we are strong! Collaboration between clinicians and engineers as an enabler for better diagnosis and therapy of atrial arrhythmias", a special issue of the journal "Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing" was published that contains works presented at the Atrial Signals conference in Karlsruhe. The editorial furthermore highlights the lifework of Olaf Dössel and Claus Schmitt.

In an invited editorial, Axel Loewe (IBT) and Amir Jadidi (University Heart Center Freiburg Bad Krozingen) discuss the recent article by Boyle et al. in the Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology on predicting the success of pulmonary vein isolation using magnetic resonance imaging.

How do different numerical splitting schemes for solving the monodomain equation of cardiac electrophysiology compare in terms of convergence, accuracy and efficiency? We answer this question collaboratively with mathematicians (CRC 1173 - Wave phenomena) in a study published in the "International Journal of Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering".

With contributions of IBT as coeditor and authors of two chapters on machine learning in cardiac electrophysiology and cardiac digital twin modeling, the book was published in the series Lecture Notes in Bioengineering of the Springer publishing house.

Claudia Nagel successfully defended her PhD thesis „Multiscale Cohort Modeling of Atrial Electrophysiology - Risk Stratification for Atrial Fibrillation through Machine Learning on Electrocardiograms“ on November 17th, 2022. Our heartfelt congratulations!

From September 28 to September 30 the IBT took part at BMT2022 ("Joint Annual Conference of the Austrian, German and Swiss Societies for Biomedical Engineering") in Innsbruck. 3 students and 4 PhDs were responsible for 5 presentations and 2 posters in total. Jule Bender won second place in the student's competition for her paper "A Large-Scale Virtual Patient Cohort to Study ECG Features of Interatrial Conduction Block". Congratulations!
Additionally, two former PhDs were awarded retrospectively for their PhD theses. Congratulations to Giorgio Luongo for getting third place in the Klee Award as well as to Ady Naber for winning the first place award for patient security.

The 49th edition of Computing in Cardiology (CinC) took place in Tampere, Finland from 04-07 Sep, 2022. 5 current PhD students from the IBT as well as Albert Dasí who is visiting our lab presented their recent work. Carmen Martínez was recognized as a semi-finalist for the Young Investigators Award and former postdoc Jorge Sánchez took home the Poster Award for the work he did while still at the IBT. Congratulations, Carmen and Jorge!

IBT researchers, together with the University Hospital of Freiburg, have systematically compared different therapeutic approaches in a cohort of 29 digital twins of atrial fibrillation patients. They were able to show that precise identification of tissue changes is crucial. Personalized computer models can help to achieve the optimal therapeutic success with the smallest possible intervention.

This year’s Computational and Mathematical Biomedical Engineering Conference (CMBE22) was hosted by the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) from June 27th to 29th. Jochen Brenneisen presented the latest studies on the Immersed Boundary Method to simulate fluid dynamics in the heart.

It was a great conference with highly interesting presentations and fruitful discussions. Conference proceedings will follow soon on https://www.compbiomed.net/2021/

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]

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.

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!

The 88th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Cardiology, which was held for the first time since 2019 in the presence of the Congress Center Rosengarten in Mannheim, was very well attended. 
More than 7,100 audience members watched the sessions of the 88th Annual Meeting, the majority of them - more than 5,300 people - on site in Mannheim. The IBT was represented with several posters and an invited talk on "Computational Cardiac Modeling - Synergies with Machine Learning" (Axel Loewe).

After more than 25 years at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Prof. Dr. Olaf Dössel with a symposium on medical technology and with various subsequent celebrations in retirement. Specialist presentations by current and former representatives of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBT) and the Städtisches Klinikum were followed by greetings from the KIT, Division III, professional associations, companions as well as the faculty and student council. At the celebration that followed, the IBT said goodbye to its head of institute with various musical personal contributions and with the traditional, self-made "doctoral hat".
Many thanks to Olaf Dössel and all the best for your retirement!

How can the maintenance effort for research software be reduced by clever concepts and automation? The article published in the journal "Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement" presents ideas and solutions using the example of openCARP.

A recent research topic published in the renowned Frontiers in Physiology journal highlights the latest progress in technology for atrial fibrillation diagnosis, monitoring and treatment.
The collection of 38 articles was co-edited by IBT researcher Axel Loewe and features 3 studies in which IBT was involved.

Our research is featured in the latest episode of Renal Research Institute's "Frontiers in Kidney Medicine and Biology" in an interview with Axel Loewe. Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript.

The Institute of Biomedical Engineering welcomes Mr. Jonathan Krauß as a new research assistant. Since January 2022, he has been working in the "Computational Cardiac Modeling“ research group on electro-mechanically coupled human heart simulations. For this purpose, efficient and robust coupling schemes will be developed and evaluated. 
Jonathan Krauß completed his studies in mechanical engineering at KIT. His research topics were focused on continuum mechanics and medical robotics.

IBT former researcher Giorgio Luongo, PhD presented a hybrid machine learning-based classification of 12-lead ECG to discriminate between patients with three different kind of atrial flutter (cavotricuspidal-isthmus-dependent vs. peri-mitral vs. other left atrium atrial flutters). This novel algorithm may aid to identify non-invasively the best ablation procedure to terminate the arrhythmia prior to the invasive procedure in the EP labs. This work is the result of a successful collaboration between 5 engineering and clinical groups (Università degli Studi di Milano, University of Leicester, ABC Federal University, Städtisches Klinikum Karlsruhe and IBT). The paper is published in EP Europace journal and is freely available.

The international "Atrial Signals" congress took place for the fourth time in September 2021 under the patronage of the Karlsruhe Municipal Hospital (Prof. Dr. med. Claus Schmitt) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Olaf Dössel ) including synergy effects.

A joint study of the University Heart Center Freiburg-Bad Krozingen and the IBT is featured on the cover page of the December issue of the renowned scientific journal "EP Europace". The study uses the ECG and ECGI to diagnose pathological changes in the atria.

The graduations season continues at IBT. We are very proud to announce that Mark Nothstein has successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Characterizing Atrial Fibrillation Substrate by Electrogram and Restitution Analysis”. Look what a nice hat his colleagues have made for him!

IBT researchers in the MY-ATRIA consortium have published a new method to better characterize atrial flutter. The approach makes use of graph-theoretical methods.

20 employees and students of IBT attended this year's annual meeting of the German society of biomedical engineering. 9 presentations and 3 posters from the three research groups were held and presented. Congratulations to Giorgio Luongo for winning the 2nd price for patient safety and to Hannes Welle for the 2nd place in the student competition.

Claudia Nagel presented her work at the workshop for Statistical Atlases and Computational Modeling of the Heart (STACOM). In her presentation, she talked about an application of the bi-atrial statistical shape model developed at IBT for identifying left atrial enlargement with the 12-lead ECG.

Let's congratulate our colleague Giorgio Luongo and the whole team for winning the second prize for the patient safety in biomedical engineering 2021 with the publication “Machine learning enables noninvasive prediction of atrial fibrillation driver location and acute pulmonary vein ablation success using the 12-lead ECG”. The award was handed in occasion of the BMT 21 conference in Hannover, and offered by the German Society of Biomedical Engineering (DGBMT).

IBT researchers have published an improved ventricular coordinate system for localization, data mapping and regression on cardiac geometries. An open MATLAB implementation of the method for precise and intuitive description of position in the heart is available for the community.
To the article

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!

Das IBT nimmt an der jährlichen VDE DGBMT Kongressveranstaltung teil.

Eight delegates represented IBT at this year’s Computing in Cardiology conference in Rimini which brought together both onsite and remote participants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current issue of the popular scientific journal „Spektrum der Wissenschaft“, the German branch of the Scientific American, features an article of the head of the Computational Cardiac Modeling group at IBT. Under the headline „A digital heart“, Axel Loewe describes the motivation for and the basics of computational heart models and illustrates first successful examples of translation to clinical practice and clinical research.

That is the topic of the Herrenhausen Forum on July 14, 2020. The discussion with experts from IT, medicine and law was about responsibility and trust.

In collaboration with the Politecnico of Milan, IBT presented an electromechanical model of bi-ventricular human geometries to study influences on the pressure-volume relation.

In collaboration with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at KIT and the University Heart Center Freiburg – Bad Krozingen, researchers from the Medical University Hospital Heidelberg published an article on the antiarrhythmic effects of A293 on cardioversion of atrial fibrillation. As a high-affinity potassium channel inhibitor, A293 mitigates the pathological shortening of the atrial action potential duration.  The study indicated the therapeutic potential of A293 for the treatment of atrial fibrillation with single cell experiments, a porcine model, as well as computer simulations in a three-dimensional atrium. The open access article was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA).

The collaborative opinion article "An environment for sustainable research software in Germany and beyond: current state, open challenges, and call for action" was recently published as a preprint for open peer review in F1000Research. This paper is the outcome of a workshop at the first German conference on Research Engineering and a dedicated DFG-funded follow up workshop hosted by the Robert Koch Institute. KIT and IBT researchers played a leading role in bringing together the group and coordinating the writing process. With more than 40 authors and wide community review, this grass-roots initiative calls for action to make software a first class citizen in research.

Two members of the IBT attended, presented two talks and shared their results on novel segmentation methods and a 3D microscale test target at the SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Francisco on the 01st February to 06th February. The useful feedback will be incorporated in further research and contact to possible new collaborates was set.

The issue 1/2020 of the "dotnetpro“ journal features an article about the research of the cardiac modeling group. dotnetpro delivers expert knowledge for software developers, who use Microsoft technologies to write programs for Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms. The idea behind the article is to provide a broader view for the dotnetpro readers, who mostly are software developers. The article introduces and describes the implementation of the multiscale simulation approach (from ion channels via cells and tissue up to the organ) for electrophysiology, which is developed and used at IBT.