Custom Cardiology: A Virtual Heart for Every Patient
The new field of computational medicine is making some impressive advances in producing computer models of individual patients’ organs. IEEE Spectrum has the story on a team at John Hopkins University who have been perfecting their virtual heart model to contribute to a new level of personalized health care:
Biomedical engineers have learned how to use numerical models to generate increasingly sophisticated “virtual organs” over the past decade, and rapid developments in cardiac simulation have made the virtual heart the most complete model of all. It’s a complex replica, as it must mimic the heart’s workings at the molecular scale, through the cellular scale, and up to the level of the whole organ, where muscle tissue expands and contracts with every heartbeat. What’s more, the modeling at these different scales must be tightly integrated to accurately render the constant feedback interactions that govern the functions of the heart.
Such models have already proved their value for basic cardiac research, allowing scientists to plug in experimental data and study what goes on in both normal and diseased hearts. Now, virtual hearts are poised to deliver breakthroughs at the bedside.
Starting with a patient’s MRI scans, specialists in computational cardiology can create a personalized model of the patient’s heart to study his or her unique ailment. Doctors can then poke and prod the computerized organ in ways that simply aren’t possible with a flesh-and-blood heart. With these models at their disposal, cardiologists should be able to improve therapies, minimize the invasiveness of diagnostic procedures, and reduce health-care costs.
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