Improving Diagnosis and Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease

A new European Union- (EU)-funded research project is aimed at improving the personalized diagnosis, therapy, planning, and treatment of cardiovascular disease--one of the biggest causes of mortality in the western world.

The ‘euHeart' project's purpose is the development of virtual versions of people's hearts, so that doctors can make the best decisions for their patients before performing minimally invasive surgery. The technology will also map the unique electrical and muscle activity within the heart, so that clinicians should be able to work out the likely impact of different treatment options. It is predicted the models could help improve treatment of patients with heart failure (HF), coronary artery disease (CAD), and congenital heart defects.

Another area in which the technology could be useful is in the case of rhythm disorders treated by radiofrequency (RF) ablation. Currently doctors rely on their own experience to decide which areas to target; however, this is a serious challenge since the electrical activity in each person's heart is subtly different. With a computer model that perfectly matches the patient's anatomy and mimics the electrical activity of their heart, doctors could know in advance the likely impact of destroying specific areas of tissue and work out the likely success of the treatment for a patient. The virtual heart models are created by combining data from existing diagnostic technologies such as computerized tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electrocardiograms (ECGs), as well as blood flow and pressure measurements in the coronary arteries.

"In the euHeart project we are confident that we can make a real contribution to improving the treatment of one of the most important world's killer diseases,” said Henk van Houten, senior vice president of Philips Research (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and head of the euHeart healthcare research program. "The development of computer models that integrate structural and functional information of the heart and then personalize it to individual patients is a mammoth task that will require the multi-disciplinary effort of researchers with strong know-how in biophysical modeling and image processing, clinical experts, and engineers in the device and imaging industries.”

The euHeart project involves public and private partners from 16 research, academic, industrial, and medical organizations from six different European countries--Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. The project will run for four years and has a budget of EUR 19 million.

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