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.