From June 17th to June 21st, Stephanie and Silvia attended the Summer School in Bordeaux to deepen their knowledge of cardiac electrophysiology. Engaging lectures and an interactive lab tour at Liryc made this week a remarkable experience.

In this study by Oxford University and KIT, various therapies were systematically investigated in 800 virtual patients with atrial fibrillation. The study aims to assign patients in whom pulmonary vein isolation was not successful as an initial therapy to optimal pharmacological and ablation therapies on the basis of in-silico tests. Treatment strategies vary depending on atrial size and the presence of low-voltage areas. In-silico models are a promising tool for individual therapy optimization in atrial fibrillation.

From June 2 to June 4, the Fickle Heart Workshop took place at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Science in Cambridge, focusing on digital twins, artificial intelligence and uncertainty quantification tools for calibration and forecasting. Axel, Patricia and Stephanie took the opportunity of this workshop to present their work in this field.

In this year’s European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) conference in Lisbon, our PhD student Joshua Steyer presented his results on electrograms in a cell-to-cell cardiac model within the "Computational Cardiology: Modeling and Simulating the Heart" mini-symposium.

During April the conference of the German society of cardiology (DGK) and the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) took place bringing together cardiologists from Germany and around the world. On the 7th-9th The European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) conference took place in Berlin. Our PhD student Patricia Martínez was nominated for the Young Investigator Award in the Basic and Translational Science category and presented her work on the effects of right atrial arrhythmia susceptibility in patient-specific computer models.

In this year’s Biosignals Workshop in Göttingen, we presented our work on electrograms in a cell-by-cell model. We have shown that healthy excitation propagation, as opposed to what we would expect in homogenised models, yields asymmetric electrograms exhibiting several small deflections. These deflections, in turn, can be explained by the multimodality of cell activation as well as the deceleration of the excitation wave when transitioning between two cardiac cells.

A new course for Master Students will be offered since SS24 from IBT lectures. The course, titled “Medical Image Processing for guidance and navigation”, will be worth 6 ECTs for a total of 4 hours per week of lectures/practical exercises plus the accomplishment of a group project.
The language of the lecture is English.

This open access book has brought together 138 experts in In Silico Trials working in academia, the medical industry, regulatory bodies, hospitals, and consulting firms. Through a consensus process, these experts produced the first attempt to define some Good Simulation Practices on how to develop, evaluate, and use In Silico Trials.  Good Simulation Practice constitutes an indispensable guide for anyone who is planning to engage at any title with In Silico Trials. IBT researcher Axel Loewe has co-edited the chapters Model Development and The Investigator: Modellers and Analysts.

Together with our collaborators at the Institute for Applied and Numerical Mathematics, we investigated the impact of modeling choices such as mesh size, incompressibility constraint, active strain or active stress as well as the choice of the damping scheme. Click here to learn about our findings: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gamm.202370010

Which effects does the mechanical activation of the heart cause on the electrical control of cardiac rhythm and excitation? Using the fully coupled electro-mechanical computer model of the heart developed at IBT, we showed that mechano-electric feedback changes activation and repolarization patterns throughout the heart during sinus rhythm and leads to a markedly more heterogeneous electrophysiological substrate. Read the full study published open access in The Journal of Physiology.