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".