Your Own Virtual Heart for Non-Invasive Heart Diagnostics

One day, a virtual version of your own heart pumping may help doctors diagnose heart disease and determine the best treatment, without the need of surgical intervention or other invasive clinical practices. EPFL mathematician Alfio Quarteroni's goal is precisely this as he builds a 'mathematical microscope' to simulate heart function with increasing accuracy and that can be personalized to a patient's heart based on medical scans.

Transcript

00:00:02 We use mathematical models to describe what happens in the heart. Heart is a very important organ of our body, cardiovascular diseases are responsible for more than 45% of deaths in Europe and 30% of death in the world. We can personalize this type of description to specific patients and we might be able, one day, to provide cardio-surgeons and cardiologists with a tool which is a powerful, quick and accurate, and that could be used for personalising medicine. In particular, we want to describe the possibility of exchanging blood between the ventricle and the aortic root through the aortic valve. This is extremely important because, in this way, we will be able to describe the circulation of blood in the whole human circulatory system so we describe the behaviour of

00:00:50 the aortic valve as being a three-dimensional object. We simulate the three leaflets of the aortic valce. This is the first time that we have been able to describe such a complex mechanism with a very accurate mathematical model. Of course this is only a part of the whole story because heart is a very important organ that functions because of the presence of the electrical field this triggers the contraction of the myocardium, and this contracts the ventricle and therefore blood is ejected from the ventricle. So it is the coexistence of all these fields, the electrical field, the mechanical field and the fluid dynamics field, that make the heart function in this way and this is why we want to use mathematical models to understand the whole function. Now we need

00:01:37 to connect what's happening in the heart with what's happening in the rest of the circulatory system. We're working on that, we already have partial results and this is very important to be able to simulate other diseases such as carotid stenosis or abdominal aneurysms that are so important for the human beings. you